v1.10alpha3 available for testing

Since the original release of Polymer Picker late last year, several niggling issues got to me about the general flow of the game. Over the last few months, I've been tinkering with a few new features, to up the ante in terms of gameplay.

As a result of feedback on this Stardot thread, the third alpha release of v1.10 of Polymer Picker is available to download, and try out in your favourite BBC Micro emulator (jsBeeb is a great browser based one to use)

So what has been added to this latest version? An extra adversary - jellyfish!

4 rather large, vibrantly coloured jellyfish will appear at random locations within the ocean. If you swim near or through them, you will be hurt, in much the same way as the shark. Your oxygen supply level will decrease more quickly.

On the first few levels, the jellyfish just float statically. On later levels however, they move up and down, at varying speeds. Since later levels also include poisonous fish, and the shark chasing you, the difficulty ramps up quite dramatically.

This is where the second amendment comes in - you now get an unlimited number of spare air tanks. Before, you only got one spare, so you had to use it wisely. However, those later levels necessitate the ability to grab an extra air tank, as you'll get inflicted with a lot of damage! Just collect a new tank when your air supply reaches around 50%.

The only other changes are under the hood improvements, namely to the collision detection, as this required further work for cope with the added hazards. Extra care was required to cater to the extra sprite, and therefore increased memory requirements to handle it. The game is very near the limit of available memory in a 32k BBC Micro (20k is given to screen memory alone - once the operating system is taken into account, you only have about 7 or 8k left for the game to run in!)

My hope is I can formally release v1.10 onto Itch.io, my personal site, and the BBC Games Archive in due course.

Any feedback on the game and these version updates, would be most welcome.