Welcome crane550!
I tried playing the game for a short time and it worked well. I found the response to arrow key presses interesting, kind of "floaty", nice feel except when it dwells on edge of screen when trying to reverse direction. (I have not examined code to see if anything special was used to achieve that effect.)
First thing I would do is take advantage of _MOUSEHIDE command.
Thanks!
Here is my logic for the edges...tell me if I'm right or wrong. I wanted this to be a velocity game. Each key press add velocity to the ship, and it maintains that velocity. You don't actually get to change the ships position, the computer does that. I did add a decay to the velocity, so contrary to strict Newton physics it does slow down...slowly. When you hit the edge your velocity remains the same in that direction, but the position is limited. So you have to overcome your velocity in the other direction before you turn around. That means when you stop on the edge it isn't just a quick key press to return back towards the center of the screen. The idea was to encourage the player to not simply scrub the walls.
I also wanted to encourage the player to hang out 1/3 from the bottom of the screen, but not the very very bottom so there is also a "nudge" that kicks the player towards Y = 290, or something around there.
Feel free to suggest otherwise (I may or may not do it. :) ) There are pros and cons to this.
Any recommendations on the overall structure of the program?
Do not hate me, but I might port it over to C++ and continue development from there, although the barrier just to get pixels on the screen in C++ is quite high.
Alex