Mass reply

To aidave

The budge spell is very important to the game, make sure it isnt going thru terrain, and has a direct line from your hand to the item you are trying to catch.
After a few trials I've been able to "hook" the budge to the shard by standing right on top of it, however, more often than not, I wouldn't be able to "pull" the shard with it, like if it were stuck into the ground (when that happens, I found the only way to get the shard moving again was to repeatedly bump into it until it got "unstuck").

1024x768 or 1200x1024 is the best.
Tried it, there is more screen estate, but the mouse isn't smooth still: when you move the mouse slowly f.i., the view will rotate in slow steps (one step each time the cursor would move by one pixel I guess).

To AthenaOfDelphi

The console is now activated with the ` key. I have since found that this could be a problem on some keyboards
This is the key I tried (it's labelled with an exponent '2' here, but I've seen enough games use it to recognize it), though I guess I'm one one of the keyboards with the "problem"
I've had good success using GetAsyncKeyState to detect it's being pressed (ie. with virtual key code rather than key character).

the field of view which is approximately 180 deg. If they lose you, they will stop and perform a basic search (look around them)
The impression I had is that the orientation of their field of view was "fixed", like if instead of looking in the direction they're walking, they were looking "upward" (when not in search mode).

To Traveler

As far as I can tell, rules dont specify the actual representation of a new level.
For this stage, I considered a "level" as being a different "map", as the enemy waves you have aren't too different from say, enemy waves in a scrolling shooter (of which you can have many in the same level), and all other entries had something close to that.

For the next stage, maybe WILL or Savage can clarify the goal to define what exactly constitues a "level".

To Huehnerschaender

Will this influence judging? Is this annoying or somewhat looking unprofessional? Should I spent time on it?
The main risk would be if the user has other applications that would react to the screen resolution change, but not identify it as some other app going fullscreen because they receive a "paint" message. Not of utmost importance, but may not be too complex to fix and would look cleaner IMO (and may speedup game start).

I know that the game captures the mouse, but imagine playing it without that "feature". MS Word in the back, Tanx in the front.... You are in a hurry to kill an enemy.
As suggested, pausing the game would be a user-friendly solution to that. When selecting 'windowed', you usually want to be able to click on other things - if only to move the game window around your desktop

1280x1024 I am on...
Be aware 1280x1024 suffers from a slightly "distorted" aspect ratio when not viewed on current-generation 19" flat panels, as its aspect ratio is 1.25 vs 1.33 of the usual 4/3 display of CRTs and other panels.

But I found out, that it is as I intended on my monitors, and darker on others.. I will try to fix this. But I didn't take further a look at it now...
It's a bit like with aspect ratios, screens can have wildly different intensity nowadays, across models or even across settings, from LCDs that have "bright darks" to those TN panels where everything below RGB$202020 is the same uniform "black"... talk about gamma correction hell :roll: