On to the problem with the planet. I am having real probs with this. The planet is a 512x512 sprite. I didn't want to use a mesh because it seemed like wasted polys. The planet glow is the same size sprite scaled x 1.12 and positioned behind the planet. I have tried playing around with entity order and different flags but no luck. If I mask the planet glow (flag 4) it doesn't flicker but I loose the smooth fading at the edges. Can anyone offer suggestions on this?
For the game I am working on I use a sprite which was textured with a transparent png file. The image include the a glow which gradually faded out. This was the easiest way for me. You can see the results in one of the screen shots on my site (its under WIP -> then scroll to the bottom and click old wip section).
About the transcript being hard to read. You are so right. Every time I play it I think to myself, "Oh, I gotta do something about that," but then something more important crops up. So, thanks for the comment on that.
Perhaps you could use something like SpriteCandy or TotalFont. Both give good results. I opted for SpriteCandy because it gave me a total solution for my HUD.
I guess to sell a game you need to give people what they want.
What sort of price did you have in mind... I wouldnt want you to be disappointed as there are a lot of very very good shootem ups available as freeware. So really you would need to offer something above and beyond in your game to attract the punters.
Cheers,
unc