LittleBear
says: Measure once, cut twice.
Sleeper Brakeman, from Noitu Love 2, is quite simply an awesome boss. You have to love steam engines. My early pick for “Boss of the Year” 
I’ll quote Joakim again:
Bosses are also an integral part of my life. I love to make them and I love to play them. They are what life is about!
If you haven’t bought this yet, I have no idea what you’re waiting for.
Smiley’s Shooty Adventure is the first game released from the new Caffeine Monster Software. Many will know Mobeen Fikree as SiN, who in addition to being the creativity behind Caffeine Monster is also associated with Binary Zoo.
It’s a great first title, very old-school Williams to me, with simple graphics, sound, and classic game play. It’s an arena shooter, with support for a dual-stick, and while so far I haven’t seen anything really new it does all the little things (the expected things) right.
One thing I really like is the simple scoring bonus. Its beauty lies in its simplicity. The faster you shoot enemies the faster your bonus increases. Start shooting too slow and it goes down. No need to think too hard, just remember to shoot fast 
I mentioned all the little things that are done right. There’s support for 2 players, support for joysticks, and there’s even support for screen shots. Overall the game is very nicely packaged, it’s a ton of simple fun, and I definitely recommend trying it out. And then throw some money SiN‘s way
Vive les Canadiens.
The DUX Blog has more screen shots (shown below) of Stage 2, and a list of the enemies from Stage 1. Nice style, interesting colour palette. Looking forward to playing this in July.
Charlie, of Charlie’s Games (and Shmup-Dev competition judge, and other things I’m sure ) sent me an email regarding Bullet Candy. He’s dropped the price to $3.95, which is an insanely good value. All proceeds go to help him finish the next one. Good news, that.
Here’s some added colour for the post as requested
I’m actually not sure what to call this little post, since it’s a bit of an odd mix of things loosely related. Started off with Oddbob‘s Create your own Retro Shooter article. It’s about the Shoot ‘Em Up Designer for the ZX Spectrum. That’s cool in itself, but I really got thinking about this part:
All told, it took about 15 minutes from opening SEUD to getting something substantial up and running on the screen. Which is nice considering it usually takes me half an hour to an hour to get a quick prototype running for a PC game.
There’s something to be said for getting ideas “on paper” so fast, and being able to get early visualizations.
It used to take me the better part of a couple hours just getting a project copied, new build scripts created, and a renamed “basic game” class written in order to get a black window to open. Thankfully one of the most productive projects I’ve started is an OSGi game platform. There are many ways to abstract your code, and using OSGi encouraged me to come up with some proper designs.
I’m now able to get ideas up and running in about 1/2 an hour. I’m really happy with this, as it’s in my “sweet spot” for scheduling. What with my day job, family, and posting here, that’s about all I have to spare most evenings.
Speaking of the Speccy, Pixel_Outlaw and I were talking about R-Type today and he sent me the link below. Check out the Jamaican themed level
Edit: Proper link and application name given, must have been blurry-eyed when I read the original article. Thanks to Shoot-em-upper for pointing this out.
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William R. Swaney. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
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