Well, after relaunching the Bullet Mechanics website i’ve actually found a little time to program something! When Vinculum was originally released i referred to it as being the “competition form”; the intention was always to return to it and produce a complete, full scale game from that base. And that’s what has been happening over the last three or four days. The code has gone through the wringer, with the attack wave mananger receiving a major overhaul to convert it from X and Y speeds to angles with special commands for accelleration, decelleration and rotation meaning that most nasties now require under half the data to define. Several flaws in the code that were painted over by never allowing them to occur have also been fixed and the way the program flow is handled made less of a kludge so the back engine generally seems a much happier bunny now.

Vinculum V2 preview

A gaggle of cosmetic changes have been made too, the mental particle explosions are now much more controlled and have some nice smaller particles bursting out to augment them (that should be visible in the screenshot), some enemies rotate to point in the direction they’re currently heading and the enemy bullets are easier to see generally due to those tamer explosions and cycle their colours to stand out further. The action doesn’t stop when the player explodes any more, instead the ship goes “boom” and is almost immediately thrown back into the fray with some shielding. Generally speaking, the new feel is a bit more fluid and, despite currently only running on five waves because the old data wasn’t compatible with the new system, already feels pretty nice to play. i might even have a solution to the issue of getting a boss fight working in the Vinculum game mechanic…!