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Yes, I know it's unexpected, but I'm taking a break from programming for an indefinite period of time. I'm so burnt out that it isn't even funny. That's the main reason that I haven't been on the forums at all lately. I have a bad habit of taking on gigantic projects and working myself to death trying to finish them... It happened with Gamma, and now it's happening with this project and I haven't even finished it.

The point is that I can't work on SECTOR91 like it's a full-time job. There aren't enough people who care about it anyway. I'll come back and keep working on it sooner or later, but I need to relax and stop working for a while. There are a lot of other things that I want to spend my time doing, and other ideas that I want to experiment with (In particular, Im thinking about learning Flash, because I now have a copy of it.) I'll be back soon, and work on Project Delta will resume, but I don't know when yet. If my small but loyal fanbase has waited this long for this game, surely they can wait a little longer.

Yep, I'm still working on it. Now I've added a lot of new graphics, a few new types of enemies (although only one of them has graphics right now), a lot of working combination powers, tricky platforms, lots of throwable objects, and so much more. The random level generator is working fairly well now, and I've given the player some useful tricks (like a chargeable super-jump) to get around the places where it puts platforms too far apart and such.



The game now has a main menu screen, which includes my post-apocalyptic city background and my Project Delta logo that I've been wanting to show off for a while. The blank space on the left side (above the SECTOR91 button) will contain a vector-art illustration of the main character, one I've finished drawing it. The "???" button is a placeholder for a feature that may or may not make it into the first release; I don't want to give it away just yet because I'm not sure if it will work.



The random level generator currently litters the level with all sorts of props that can be thrown at enemies or used for other purposes, such as rocks, wooden and metal boxes, exploding boxes, rolling boulders, pieces of scrap metal, etc. This can be useful, but it also creates so much junk on the ground that non-flying enemies have a tendency to get stuck. There's probably a better way to place these objects than just randomly dropping them everywhere (boxes should be stacked, etc.) but I currently haven't taken the time to do that.

I've also decided on how I'm going to release Project Delta: it will be an episodic game. This means that, rather than the first release having all of the levels but lots of bugs and few features, the first release will have most of the bugs fixed and all of the necessary features and graphics present, but only the first 3 chapters (see this thread) will be available. The next release will have the next 1/3 of the levels, and more features and enemies and such will be added as they are needed. There will be 3 releases, and instead of version numbers they will be called "Project Delta Part 1," "Project Delta Part 2," etc. Each release will contain the parts of the game that were in the last release, though, so I guess it's not a true episodic game. When Part 2 comes out, you won't have to keep Part 1 around, etc.

There's still a lot to do, but I'm getting closer and closer to release. When I need to do now is make some cutscenes and story sequences work, create art and enemies for Chapters 2 and 3, add bosses, and add a lot of menu screens and other boring stuff. Here's the progress indicator again (note that it counts down to Part 1, not the full game):

Core Engine: 100%
Physics: 95%
Level Generator: 65%
Powers: 75%
Enemies & AI: 60%
Bosses: 0%
Story: 45%
Artwork: 50%

Also, if you need more screenshots...

Screenshots:
Sending an enemy flying with the Fire Wave combo power
Freezing a bunch of platforms and rocks with the Ice Storm combo power.
Fighting a miniboss (no graphics yet) with a Lightning attack.

No doubt you've noticed that I've been mysteriously silent for the past week or two, and have been wondering what I've been doing with all of that time. The answer is: I've been completely rewriting Project Delta from the ground up. The old Project Delta had begun to be extremely slow and glitchy due to the Phys2D physics engine and the homebrew AWT-based graphics engine that I used. I found a better physics engine and graphics engine for the game (JBox2D for physics and Slick for hardware-accelerated graphics), but implementing them required the game's code to be almost completely rewritten. Now that the rewrite is complete, the results are well worth it. Just look at the screenshot below (the red circles are enemies):



By combining some of my own homebrew graphics methods with Slick's particle effects, I've been able to create some awesome attack effects. The enemies now have decent AI, and a lot of props with special effects (like exploding boxes) have been added, so the battle system is actually fairly playable right now, and it's a lot of fun. I've added even more usable powers, and I've changed the effects of a few of them--most notably the Lightning power, which now seeks the nearest enemy.



As you can see, a lot of the graphics that the game had in the previous update have actually been removed; I didn't like the look it had very much, and at this stage of development it's easier to just use boxes and lines than images anyway.



I'm going to start adding more different types of enemies now, and then making the random level generator create complete levels (by creating many rooms connected by doors). If you want a general indicator of how far along the game is, here's some rough estimates:

Core Engine: 100%
Physics: 80%
Level Generator: 50%
Powers: 30%
Enemies & AI: 35%
Bosses: 0%
Story: 45%
Artwork: 10%