With no-one coming forward to offer artistic support I pushed forward and reworked / improved to my limitations, all background graphics.

Then added the remaining lives indicator and improved AI attack patterns,

From very early on in the games development I wanted to use a restricted number of texture tiles for the background, and the four layer parallax background had used only 1 texture (tile) per layer. Expanding the level 1 demo I wanted to go beyond the 4 screen widths of the current playable area but soon discovered that due to a Direct X 10 limitation that appears to be coded into SDL2, or potentially limited by available graphics card memory, there is a maximum texture size of 8192 x 8192 pixels.

As my 4x (1920x1080 pixel) screen width was already 7680 pixels wide I had hit a single texture width limitation with my current background renderer, but modifying this code I stacked 4 x 4 screen lengths in a (7680 x 4320 pixel) texture for the front parallax layer. Stacking like this provides 16 x (1920x1080 pixel) screen lengths in a single texture of 7680 x 4320, below the limit of 8192 x 8192, and the three additional background layers of parallax are naturally smaller @ 4224 x 4320, 3037 x 4320 and 2497 x 4320.

The 16 screen length implementation works well and only required some tweaks to address the stacked background data, while allowing me to stick to 1 texture (tile) per parallax background level, and while I stopped at 16 screen lengths I'm now free to go to a maximum single background layer texture of 7680 x 7560 pixels which would provide 28 (1920x1080 pixel) screen lengths!

Still plenty to do:

• Additional Enemies and attack patterns
• Crystal Collection System
• Crystal Quota Counter (Main game objective)
• Level Time Limits / Countdown (Played against the clock)
• End Level Bosses & Control Switch for Boss Fights
• Additional Sound & Music (my collaborator dropped out so I'm solo again)
• Additional Level Design
• Additional Animations

Download the pre-alpha Parallax Zoom!! Demo: https://www.gamedev.net/projects/4262-parallax-zoom/​

or from: https://www.deftdelta.com/​