Not the end of the world, but the end of the chrismas break

Greetings to all of you out there. I hope you all had a nice christmas and new year and you all had some time to rest. However, unfortunately, the holidays don't last forever so it's back to work. This time it's up to me to share some more of this sinus, apple and orangey goodness.

Although we were busy celebrating the holidays, some work was done. Jaimy made good progress on the level editor:

You can drag the blocks from the right hand side of the screen to the grid to create your own levels. and these levels can be saved to a file so you can play them anytime you want. However, the editor is long from done. Several restrictions are missing, deleting blocks is not possible, and the control of the editor isn't very intuitive yet. but all these things will be fixed in the upcoming week and I'm sure Jaimy's work is going to result in a great editor.

Aart has primarily been working on the graphical effects, heat haze in particular. The effect is now working but still needs some tweaking. I wanted to show you guys how it looks but unfortunately it's impossible to see on a screenshot and I'm too lazy to post a video.

Speaking of video's, I created a little intro for our game yesterday. It's precisely 5 seconds long and took me about 4 hours to make (including watching tutorials).

Marciano has been working on the special abilities the races will have, they should be almost finished but unfortunately the code is not available to me yet. that means that I can't show you how they look or work.

Bas has continued his creative tour and has created several more sprites. Sand and palm trees for a beach-like look, snow and ice for the opposite and a volcano for a very special type of level. Furthermore, he made sprites for crates and TNT boxes, boxes that will eventually be able to explode but they will have to be implemented first.
Bas has also made (and I'm quoting him) "another crappy piece of music"
Donwload it here

Ricardo, is as always, busy inmproving the AI. He has fixed several bugs, including ones causing fatal errors (like the infamous nullReferenceException), making Aart a happy person because the crashes anoyed the crap out of him. 

I myself have been busy working on a HUD (heads-up display). When you play the game you can now see how many lives you have and what powerups you have collected. 

This HUD also contains a timer displaying the time left before the game ends. Traditionally in the final stage of the game the level will start to fill up from the outer side, becoming smaller very quickly. Stand in its way and you die.

That's it for this time.

Next time you will probably be seeing  an almost finished game, and maybe even a trailer.

Greetz

Aron