Today saw the routines that handle drawing of nasties being disassociated from the code that handles their movement; originally it didn’t seem an issue to have everything processed neatly at one time within the same method but then i decided that i wanted layers of objects!

Now i have ten drawing layers, objects default to layer 5 but can specify where they’re drawn in relation to other objects; this means that i can have tanks on the ground with airborne nasties flying overhead for example or even a series of background objects powered by the attack wave system and the collisions ignore anything on the lowest (or highest, meaning landscape detail can pass over the sprites) levels.

i’m not entirely sure about generating backgrounds in that way, though… other possible plans are a stripped back version of the attack wave system that specifically handles backgrounds (so that it doesn’t need to stop or cause issues with boss battles where the attack wave engine pauses) or simply going for tile-based backgrounds.