Hehe, I know what you mean about the backdrop - but it's usually just black, it only goes retro-hell when you score points. It's more like running through a cloud of broken stained-glass than a bedspread though, at least when it's in action
. The whole game has a retro flavour, even has a scroller with GeeCee style bitmap font.
The path system was the toughest thing to code, it's kinda hard to explain how it works... if you imagine a lot of lines and the orb finding each end of a line and travelling to the other end, then once it get's there it remembers what direction it's been travelling then looks for any other lines that are at it's feet... The complicated part was applying the timer based movement, because often the orb would travel across more than one line. Damn tricky to keep track of all that - luckily the orbs go through each other, I originally planned to have them bounce off each other, but that idea quickly got scrapped once I tried to play a level like that. The flow of this game is great though, everything churns along at a happy pace and the player just has to keep up with things as best they can.
Van-B
