As it tends to be a habit of mine to conjure up different project ideas so is it to cycle through to the neglected when I need a change.

Currently I have three active projects, The Crawl, General Kings and Black Shadow.

Currently General Kings is being neglected as I redo the editor for The Crawl, which so far is coming along nicely.

But I grew tired of just plain coding and felt like doing some tile-based level work and dusted of Black Shadow for some rehauling of the engine and levels.

A few nice changes that may not have been noticed before are that enemies now have dependant attacks. Previously they shared attack objects which made it unlikely that you could face more then one opponent and thus seriously degraded the gameplay. Thats been corrected now and I've set to include more enemies in the levels.

The resolution is now fixed to 320x200 and the map overview has been disabled, maybe forever.

Another notable change is a newly added experience system. Instead of gaining levels though, you just gain additional life. You start with a full row and can have up to three rows of life points. You can also find life powerups hidden in places.

Tiles have been altered, some color-wise, all in their contrast have been changed and some improvements here and there.

A montage of shots of the completely new levels. An adjusting experience bar has been added to the overhead display.

Your attack, defense and magic abilities are still increased by finding their respective powerup items and the annoying narrator message for first finds of an item has been eliminated.

I've considered having some kind of item system as well to add to what you can do in them game, mostly planned for mini-quests you can get from towns folk or secrets in-game.

Retooled demo of Black Shadow

The controls have changed so read the attached text file in the zip.