Hello,
this is another short update: I made a short story intro for the game. This intro replaces the menu entry "Story" (which was just a text box) in the main menu and it is played when the game is started.
In the first iteration, I had some problems with jiggly movement while the images were zooming and fading. It turned out that the problem was the fact that SDL_Surface blitting only allows pixel precision (integer positions) and no sub-pixel precision (floating point positions). I reworked the whole thing to use SDL_Textures, which can use floating point positions and also linear interpolation when scaling images (the previous version used the nearest neighbor algorithm which intensified the pixel flickering).
The whole intro can be watched on YouTube in either English or German:
Thank you for reading and see you soon,
Carsten
Ha, let me guess… You did listen to the classic Flaming Bess prog rock album a lot? :D