Mercurian - horizontal shmup

[Foppy]

Some progress was made on this game over the last couple of weeks. The online high score table is working. It uses names of just three characters as seen in old arcade games. Mainly because I do not want to worry too much about swear words. I talked about this in the chat with Eldon and he suggested using regular expressions to filter out bad words in longer names, good advice indeed but in the end I decided to take the easier route. I still added a small list of funny words one could construct or hint at using three characters, including a few Dutch ones of course (just in case I'd drink a few beers and decide to vandalize my own game).

The high score table shows a maximum of the 100 best scores of the current month. (First I thought about also showing today's best scores but different timezones would make this confusing and not work.)

While playing the high score ranking based on the current score (and on the most recently downloaded high score data) is displayed next to the score. This idea I borrowed from Sine Mora (edit: and/or Kosmik Revenge!), I think.

I added enemies that crawl on the ceiling and drop down when the player shoots them or gets too close. Then they fall on the ground and continue walking, and sometimes pause to shoot some fireballs at the player. Another addition is blue guys, which are alternatives to the green guys. The blue guys fire bouncing lasers. These and the other enemy types make first appearances at different moments, and after that at increasing rates, so as the player flies from one level to the next the screen becomes increasingly crowded. I am smearing out the enemies a bit more than before to make sure most people will be able to play for at least a few minutes before losing all three lives. Maybe some flying enemies will still be added.