Now the holidays are nearing over, I'm back into Udo with both feet running and have added spikes:



These are also there to confirm that the death animation looks cool enough when not started off screen in the water and it works okay for me.

I think I need to start thinking about putting some sound effects in next before it gets out of hand.

I don't have any decent music for this sort of game though - does anyone reading this have any skills in that area and would like to team up on this project, by any chance? I could really use the help of someone who could write a short repeating loop that could be reduced down to a WAV file for the background music.

Anyway, plea over and feel free to download the updated demo if you want to see how it is progressing.

[EDIT] Just in case anyone else ever struggles with this, I've just managed to fix a fault I'd noticed, whereby if you press ALT on its own, the game would freeze until you press it again, presumabley because it went into the mode windowed apps do when you press alt and it waits for a menu key.

I just added:

case WM_SYSKEYDOWN: return 0;

to the WndProc switch. This appears to have disabled the problem above as well as ALT+F4 exiting, which is also handy, but ALT-Tab and so on still work.

If anyone thinks that is a bad solution, please let me know but it seems to have solved the problem for me quite simply.

[EDIT AGAIN] Scrap all that. Caused all sort of weird problems. I've found instead that I need to handle WM_SYSKEYUP and WM_SYSKEYDOWN and just pass them along (I use the windowsx.h message crackers) to the same handler as the normal key up and down messages.

This seems to make it think ALT+Left is just the same as Left, it removes Alt-F4 closing and solves the ALT key pausing the game problem.

I suppose that if I replicated the key handling function so I had a different one for the Syskey messages that did the same thing, I could special case stuff like the F4 virtual code in the syskey handler to provide a controlled exit game function.