I've made some progress with my next project. Although the next screenshot looks a lot like the previous one, a lot has changed since under the hood.

Follow up:

The platforming physics are in place and they work to sweet perfection. This was a royal pain to achieve - the deeper I dug myself into floating point based platforming (which is what Tragedius and Space Garden Punchonaut used too, and they weren't flawless), the more frustrating it became. Note that the calculation part isn't something awfully hard - it's how and when to handle the actual collision so that it looks and feels right, no jitters, no jumping, no glitches at all. I have finally came to a solution that's pixel perfect, works with axis aligned objects of whatever size (so long they don't move faster than the size of the grid - not half of the grid! - per frame) and doesn't need to resort to special case handling.

In the collision map you only specify the tile material. The rendering will analyse the map and calculates the tile junctions. It's a method that Joachim Despland has introduced me to ages ago; I like it, because you don't see it used very often, however it isn't only fresh to the eye, but also looks great, and what's best, it saves you having to create the transitions between materials yourself - it's all procedural. Of course this system has been in the place right from the beginning; what changed is that it doesn't have to analyze the whole collision map every time you want to change something.

And that makes the levels WYSIWYG-editable. This is just something that I added last minute. Again, it isn't something revolutionary - even I have done something similar for Rectangle Rodeo (although XRhodes were nowhere near where it is now; XRSF and other components didn't exist).

Still, this will be enough inspiration to keep me going. Next up is additional graphics, parallax scrolling backgrounds and foregrounds and level serialization .