I’ve been slacking off quite badly as of late – at least compared to the amount of work I got done before the summer vacation – but what the hell, you can’t blame a man for wanting to play games rather than make ’em.

That being said, I have with the help of a fella named Cory managed to finish up the last of the sprite/strip related work which I swear to God is the most boring thing about this entire project. Basically, all the fancy animations have been imported properly from the original game now, so I don’t need to bother with those any longer.

So what’s done? I just finished adding the turtle enemy, which leaves the rather infamous final boss – more dirty code hacks will most surely follow in that particular bastard’s path. Parts of the internal bounty code has been rewritten, too.

But what’s left? For now: said endboss (aka the fiercest predator in the world!), statistics submission and validation of said data, some boss fight code improvements, a statistics menu in-game, and more importantly, a quick draft of the game balance with 3 and 4 players (for 1 and 2 players SH will match TSH’s structure).

I can’t give an estimate of how long all this will take, since I’d most likely end up disappointing you anyway. Let’s just say my motivation is dangerously close to zero for the time being, which makes me a very lazy coder. I’ll try to keep updates more frequent (maybe even – cough, cough – get a Twitter), but for now, this is just about everything I’ve done. I’m looking forward to the private beta testing as much as you guys probably do, but I don’t wish to give out a rather broken and unpolished prototype – even if it is, as aforementioned, merely for private testing.

‘Till next time.