I can tell from the hurtful lack of emails and comments that this past week without update has been noticed by most of you.

I can explain. And this isn’t just one of those explanations meant to stall for time and an opportunity for escape. It is that, but also nothing more.

There were a lot of things to be done after coming back from Victoria this past weekend. Most interesting being a second game demo contest with Shaun Kiernan, to be judged by his girl-friend’s sister’s boy-friend, Richard.

Once long ago a similar competition resulted in Prawnager’s Nightmare (which can be found somewhere in this blog’s past). That time, we had a month. This time, we had only a week.

The limited time forced me to leave bits and pieces I’d have rather included out. Smoke does not rise from points of fire and destruction in the distance. There is no in-game restart, null-opt rich menu, or title screen. The player animations are limited and few. And the princess. I had only ten minutes or so to draw the princess. Which is why she is in silhouette. Unfortunately it was anything but clear over the dark, looming mountains which hints at explanation for the gross gradient.

Oh, well. It was submitted with only three minutes to spare. And I think it looks pretty cool.

Also, I really like the way I handled parallaxing, code-wise.

Sadly, it appears I forgot to embed the font.

The demo is here. It’s of reasonable size, so it might take some time to load.