Back in development during my "off-time" (so to speak). Mainly working on tilesets, new maps, new player and enemy sprites, as well as some planned out design changes. Really refining how everything should play, and (again) coding an engine from the ground up. I'm using Tiled now for map design, and it's working out really well so far since it gives me an insane amount of flexibility with the XML. Also, speaking of XML, I've written a more flexible image system allowing me to load sprites, animation data, and other important graphical stuff from an XML file. That coupled with even *more* XML defining an object's properties makes things a lot easier, and portable. Game's starting to go more in the Blaster Master direction; less weapons from bosses and more "upgrades" from bosses. Flow is starting to change, etc.
Anyway; yay progress
Project's almost a year and a half old now.