It's been a while since I made an effort to post publicly about my progress on Blackshift, but I've been hard at work!

Last time, I was on about how near to completion I was, but shortly after that I took a bit of a gamble and decided to make a major change: I added an overworld.

Before, the game just had a linear progression through all 100 levels, but now each level is located somewhere in the overworld, and you can drive around and choose which to tackle next.

l decided to create the overworld in the form of an asteroid belt, to match the spacey, sci-fi vibe of the levels themselves. Here are some of the features I've implemented:

Entering Levels

The player can simply drive to a level and press Enter. When they finish the level, roads to one or more other levels appear.

Jump pads between worlds

There are ten worlds, and each has ten levels. Completing enough levels reveals a jump pad to launch the player to the next world.

Caves

Little levels that you can't win, but you can drive through them to get to another part of the overworld.

And with that, I'm ready to say — again — that Blackshift is nearly finished. I mean it this time!