I've added even more of my Hama bead creations to the site, this time focusing on Mario:

Another effect for the ZX Spectrum Next music demo done today. Very pleased with how it turned out (no spoilers just yet).

I've also been doing some more art with Hama beads again lately and this time the subject has been ZX Spectrum Next games. I've done Crowley, Warhawk, Q-bee, Tyvarian and Baggers in Space: all of which have been added to the art page and are also below:

With the new game I'm working on for the ZX Spectrum Next I needed to come up with some code to spawn enemies at certain coordinates then get them moving in a certain direction before destroying themselves while having the player detect collision with them.

I have the collision code sorted and working well and with little cpu time used. The issue I had was that the spawning of the new enemies was taking up a lot of cpu time and while the game was running fine I wanted to optimise it as much as possible for the best performance (bearing in mind I'm coding in NextBASIC).

What I came up with was to spawn the enemies at the start and set their automatic movement straight away, but hiding them. This meant that all I had to do was tell the sprite to go to certain coordinates then it is already moving the direction I want it to go thus removing a lot of overhead with spawning it in and gaining cpu time.

All I need to do now is plug it into the game for each scenario. What this also means is that I can use this code for other games too which is always a plus.

I'm very pleased as I've improved my Next game engine even further, removing a small limitation, which now opens it up properly for what I'd like to use it for and many other projects too which I'm really excited about.

The music demo needs some effects adding to it, but there is a basic menu system in place and I just need to arrange a custom font for it. Then it'll be sorting scroller text, background etc. so that's coming on very nicely too.

The ZX Next game I'm working on is coming along nicely. The core code is there and the tilemap works very well. Next to do will be the enemies for each screen which I have already mapped out and will be a case of creating a map for them for each screen with their various attributes.

Today has been very much a tilemap day. I've got the basic tilemap done for the game I'm working on now I just need to test it out. Lots more to do, but it'll be another game for the ZX Spectrum Next you can play: