As far as coding, the only real progress was to implement the code for adding new head segments if the centipede reaches the bottom of the play area. You can see that being demonstrated in the video. I shoot all but one segment. Because it is the last segment, it accelerates and I let it reach the bottom. Once that happens, then single head segments are randomly added on the left and right side until there are up to 12 segments on the screen. There are some oddities in this video clip that I hadn’t seen before like segments passing through each other. So that is a bug to track down. But this is another piece required for the game.
Other than coding, the main thing I did this week was research. I played and recorded a number of games using mame on my Mac. And I watched some videos of other people playing the real arcade on YouTube. The goal was to try to figure out the rules around things like when do the spiders and fleas go fast, when does a flea appear, when does a scorpion first appear, and other things like that. I also read a few strategy guides for the game which had some of this info. There are multiple variants out there where these things are different, probably to play with the difficulty of the game. But I think I have all of the basic rules down for these things. I have created empty score.s and level.s files where I will start to implement some of this logic. So that is where I go next.