Hello Everyone, I'm Sir Sapo. Don't ask about the name, its a long a sorrowful story... Anyways, this is my first entry into my journal and I hope someone beside myself reads it. Before I get into any detail about my current project, I'll let you know a little about me.

I'm a (when school starts again) Junior in High School and I enjoy programming. I dislike art however, which is why I shovel all of the art workload for my games onto my friend Mark's desk. My dad is in the U.S Air Force (Aim High!!!) so I move around a lot, even though I have remained here at Holloman Air Force Base for a record 6 years!!!! I'm trying damn hard to get into the Air Force Academy so that I can follow in my father's footsteps and become a fighter pilot. I have ben flying since I was 5 and earned my solo license before my driver's license so as you can expect, most of my games involve Aviation or Military themes. But enough about me, to the games!!!

My first game was "dodge the ball", an applet written in Java. You moved a ball around and tried to dodge the smaller, faster ball... In short , sheer brilliance. DtB was so popular among my classmates, that it sprung a sequel, Dodge the Ball 2, featuring 2 little balls and a shield. However pointless DtB was, it taught me lots about collision detection, gameloops , etc. I soon moved on to more advanced concepts, such as ball that shot lines at other balls. Exciting as that may sound in theory, it wasn't, so I decided to make my first real shooter using images and whatnot. I called it Wings of War and it was a really crappy 1942 clone. The thing that I learned from WoW was that I really needed to think through my ideas when coding. This was before I knew about the marvels of OOP, so I had hardcoded the entire game. it was 1500 lines of unreadable crap that really only amounted to 2 minutes of gameplay. Anyways , school ended soon after that and I had lots of time to learn OOP. After I had that down , I realized (no flaming please :D) java just wasn't good for game development (IMHO I swear) so I switched over to C++. What a shock that was: "What do you mean I have to actually tell it to allocate memory!! And it wont even clean up after itself!! What was I thinking". But after that shock , things smoothed out and I started making games. I learned SDL , OpenGL , DirectX , and FMod over that summer, which prepared my for my comp class at school. I got to choose my project for the class so I decided to make a World War II shooting game (educational of course :D). Well, 2 months into making it, we ran out of enthusiasm and patience with SDL. having to draw each airplane at 16 different angles pissed of Mark the artist , so we decided to give that one up and start over. About a month before school ended we began our current project , Angels 20, a (guess what...) flight-action game!!!

For Angels 20 we picked a topic both of us were interested in, Counter-Terrorism, Airplanes, and Ships. We threw all of those together into our Easy-Bake Oven of Doom +12 and out came a concept.

"In the near future, terrorist groups have wittled away on the United States economic and political willpower to deal full scale war with the terrorists of the world. A agreement was reached between the main military and political leaders: N o more full-scale war with terrorists, and if they wanted to fight a war using terror, so could the U.S. , and most importantly, no more reasoning with the barbarians. A Joint Task Force was assembled in Norfolk, Virginia for the sole purpose of bringing the war to the terrorists. This task force, known as the Experiment Carrier Expeditionary Fleet (ECET) consisted of the best of the best: Adversary Pilots from the Air Force , Top Gun graduates from the Navy , the Navy's elite counter-terrorism SEAL team, soldiers from the Marine's elite Force Recon units, and a team of Delta Force operatives from the Army. The nucleus of ECET is it's flagship , the U.S.S Constellation (CVX-01), an experimental aircraft carrier housing the most advanced aircraft the world has ever seen. You are a new pilot on the Constellation, having just arrived days earlier, when the task force is deployed: Palestinian nationals have stolen a Typhoon class ballistic missile submarine from the Russians and have threatened to use the missiles on the U.S. Fearing the casualties of a nuclear war, the U.S. deploys ECET to destroy the sub and eliminate the terrorists....

Well that's the story so far, and If you've beared with me this long, you need to get a life mate.

Anyways, Angels 20 is a flight-action game modeled after Wings of Fury (the greatest old-school action game ever). You start fly a fighter, armed with your choice of Unguided Rockets, Dumb Bombs, or a Guided Missile, you muist eliminate the all the enemies on the map to get to the next level. One feature I enjoy is the "One Pilot , Many Planes" concept. If you are shot down and you eject, you will be saved, and you can take off in another fighter to wreak havoc on your would-be captors. However, if you dont punch out in time , its game over (or at least a level restart) .Features include:

-Old-School 2D Graphics via OpenGL
-A (hopefully :D) engaging storyline
-15+ single player missions
-Weather effects(rain , night/day cycles)
-built-in level editor
-Dogfight multiplayer game for up to 8 players
-Fight all different kinds of enemies over Islands , Forests,Deserts and Tundra
-Freeware!!


Anyways, thats all the time I have for now, here's a link to the beta of Angels 20;. Let me know what you think , and keep in mind this is an unoptimized beta, minimum system specs on the final will be much lower end. And forgive the music and crappy sound effects, we're working on it [grin].

Dodging SAMs (Surface to Air Missiles for the ininitiated)

Guiding the "Commie Raper" Missile to it's target

Getting rescued

Flying through the clouds with a wingman