Nice! I’ve finally managed to finish one of my projects that has – by now – been in development for quite a while…almost 2½ years in fact. However, due to a long stay on the WIP-pile the actual development time is “only” about 4 months.

So, without further ado: may I present to you – Black Widow.

It’s a vector arena-shooter that is heavily inspired by Robotron: 2084, but with insects instead of robots. Like Robotron, Black Widow also has lots of strategies for scoring and getting further into the game, but what those strategies are is something only plenty of play will reveal.

I’m very proud of this remake – it plays very well (if I may say so myself) and is absolutely ‘up there’ among the games I’ve done that are closest to the original game in playability and features. The main feature here (probably) being the updated glowing vectors, but also the usual stuff like an online highscore board and normal D-pad and twin-stick joypad control supported.

If you’re a vector-purist and don’t like my style of intense glowing vectors you can either disable the background picture which has been designed to maximise the effect of the glow, or disable the glow completely and use only colored non-glowy vectors.

I don’t normally let people test my games during development, but I did with this game and it turned up several bugs (haha) and improved the overall playability/difficulty of the game, so thanks to them …and of course to Bruce Merritt who is the designer/programmer of the original arcade game, and Atari who released it back in 1982.

…if you like it then please tell me in the commentbox below.

Argh, almost 5 months since last update…again. *sigh*

So, yeah, I haven’t been terribly active lately, but the last 3 months I’ve been getting back into development again…and I must say it feels pretty great to be working on something that’ll result in a finished game very soon.

For a couple of months a little while back I was working on a new Spectrum game, but then I decided – about a month ago – to put it on hold for a while, to just work on something else for a change, so I decided to continue working on my remake of Black Widow which I put on hold about two years ago. I’ve now been working on it for about a month and it’s very close to being finished. At this point it’ll probably still be a couple of weeks, but I think that’s the timeframe.

I’ve got one (hopefully easy to find) bug to fix, one small (and easy enough) function to be written, and some music to sort out, and  apart from that all that’s left is tweaking the gameplay and difficulty, and that shouldn’t take too long.

So, keep your eyes peeled for a new remake in the near future.

Black Widow – old WIP screenshot.