X-Bomber the Game

Welcome to the home of X-Bomber the Game; a vertical-scrolling spaceshooter for Windows, based on the Japanese sci-fi TV series; Star Fleet

It features lots of arcade action, weapons and explosions.

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In the game, there has been for some time, an 'overview map', showing all the various solar systems in which the game takes place, but there is no way of accessing it in the compiled releases.
This is because it wasn't finished to the point where I was pleased enough to show it off.

Equally, it would've meant adding and re-arranging menu options, in order to access it, and it was hard to see how to shoe-horn it into the flow of the game's briefings and levels.

Now that the briefing screen's 'intra-solar system' map works in principle, I figured that the simplest, most streamlined thing is to make a scaled-down version of the overview map for the mission select menu screen.
That menu will still show the auto-generated thumbnail of the level itself, when the mission selector matrix is highlighted, but before that, when you click "Start", it will give you this little overview.
The white brackets (which need some embellishment) move to the corresponding solar system as you cycle through the levels.

Looking back, I guess the hidden map was at least the start of an earlier attempt at what's just been put into the mission briefing screen in the last version.

So ... not finished, but I wanted to show that I hadn't just released 0.84g and decided to stop for another while.

It's done.  Use the link the right-hand column to download.

I tested it and it looks OK.  Let me know if anything seems off with it.

I don't want to release 0.84g until I have the 'planet map' thing in the briefing, which is something that I wanted to have in the game for a long time, so that the player would have an idea of 'where they were'.

Since the first chapter of missions takes place in the Simetra System, and the player returns there to defend it at the end of the game, it makes sense to kick off by starting to create a moving model of that solar system.

It wants a bit of fine-tuning, some overlay elements and some labels for the planets.
For level 1, it will get an animated path to indicate the location/course of the alliance fleet.
For level 2, it will have an overlay to represent the asteroid belt.

I think this is going to be quite cool.... if ... I can ever get it done.

Little while ago, I noticed that my old G-Shock that fought alongside for 15 years started to get intermittent problems with its solar power.
It's been damaged and repaired lots of times and Casio no longer have spares to fix its module.

I 'invested' in a Microsoft band to take some pressure off it. Microsoft hasn't made these in years and the app was cancelled afterwards.  You can pick these up for £20 new on eBay.

You need to use a band unlocker app for Windows to activate these bands over USB cable to make them work now.
Once you do that, they're pretty sweet, even without Microsoft's app. 

I noticed as I re-watched Zentrix the other week that all the characters make heavy use of their smartwatches to communicate with eachother.
We went from 2003 when the show was made and they didn't exist to now where they're all-over.

At the same time, I went to feed the hens yesterday and this thing warned me that UV was high and gave you options for monitoring it.
That reminded me about Ninestein's 'Tim' smartwatch in Terrahawks, which tracked the level of toxins in the air given off by Sram's green alien blood.

In 2065, nobody will remark at Brains talking to his watch.

Happy Easter to all!
I doodled this while in a meeting.

The super pack for the Sylph increases the ship's range, resilience and firepower.
I figure that, additional to the super pack, two large missile containers could be attached to back of the ship, containing anti-ship missile missiles, rather than the anti-aircraft missiles normally stored in the internal bays.

When reviewing the front page updates, I remembered that I had added the specific pages from Infinity magazine's article on Star Fleet to a hidden directory on the site for safe-keeping.

Since some time has passed since the relevant issue was published in 2020, I figure nobody will mind me making the directory public.

This arrived over FedEx the other day. There are 3 pages given over to Star Fleet, including one of the 32 colour pages.
I finished the scans.  Click on the image above to check them out.
I'm not sure what show features on the left of the above image.
The things in the upper-left remind me of Robotnik from Sonic the Hedgehog, but 10 years or-so earlier.

On the shipping label, it mentions "BILL SENDER".
How great would it be to work in shipping and have the name Bill Sender?

I finally got my printer working again to print the outline from Shonen Jump.

I intended to do a colour version of Ruby this way initially, by hand, but this way, we see the outputs of both methods.

I received the Kubunshu encyclopedia that has a little summary on X Bomber, but haven't scanned it yet.

At the same time, I won an auction on a Showa colouring book that I'd not seen before.
It's smaller than the others but has a unique cover.
You can see the photos from the listing and I'll scan it once I get my hands on it:
	Colouring Book C

You might notice that the Showa section has been made a bit more organised, so that people aren't trying to find things in a never-ending wall of images.