Every year, after returning from my summer vacation, I spend a week or two working on a fun little side project. This is to take a break from the massive thing that is Project Slide, and try out ideas that have been percolating in the back of my mind during the summer (or way before that).

Last summer, in 2020, I added Zig programming support to the Basis game engine as a post-vacation fun thing, but I never really did anything with it, except a little proof-of-concept in Project Slide which you can read about here.

This time around, I decided to write a little twin stick shooter, using the Zig tech from last year. There are a few reasons for this. First of all, Project Slide is huge and I want a smaller project where I can focus on simple but fun gameplay for a change. Second, I want to use the Zig support for something, but I am not comfortable writing mission-critical code in Project Slide using it since the language is not yet stable. This allows me to experiment without having it affect my main project.

Without further ado, here is the first development video for the game I call Hyper:

You might wonder, what does this mean for Project Slide? Not much. It is still my main project and I love working on it, and I will continue working on it soon. Hyper will continue (or not) in the background whenever I have time.