Hi,

More in the world of X++

The final power-up, the pulse weapon, is in now. It's a big old powerful shot, slow to move, slow to reload, but two hits from that and anything is dead.
To try and make it bigger and give it a bit more wow, I've used the particles playfield too. The particles are just little images ( Not pixels, they look too small, and it's something a lot of Flash GWars style games do, either that or they add a big ol' blur effect onto them. Neither being very nice ) which are blitted into a canvas bitmap.
Every couple of frames I run a colorMatrixFilter on that bitmap canvas to fade the alpha down, all straight forward stuff we've all been doing since F8 came along.

With the pulse I just draw() it's image into the canvas bitmap so it creates a trail / thickens it up ( For want of a better term ). Draw() is a bit costly, but I'm only ever running at most 10 pulse bullets at once ( They were always going to be slow to reload, that's why I figured I could get away with doing this extra trail effect ).
I'm really happy with it, it's in keeping with the very glowy nature of the game. BlendMode.ADD is the best thing to happen to Flash for a long time.

Once that was all in and working I did even more tweaking to the difficulty curve, the flockers now get nastier as you go, which is based both on the current level and the number of lives you have left ( If you're not doing so well there's no need to make it even harder ).

Then back to the power-ups again, and the space bar now swaps between them, which works a treat.

It's all going to plan so far, and seeing how we're on what, around 12 ( Full days ) development time, it's pretty good. It'll be nice to add the final baddie type ( Did someone say bullet hell ? ) and then the biggest thing should be the sound, which I'm a little concerned about 'cause there's a lot of things going on, and it'll be easy to just overwhelm the player with sound and make it really jar. Some thought is going to need to go into that.
From there we're looking at presentational issues and then bugs, love and play testing.

Squize.