20 April 2023:
Drew the title page. Converted the previous ALS 2023 (the Spectrum version, the one sort-of-involving Rich Pelley) to Next format, removing all the machine code calls except KJB's explosion sound (which was moved to BANK 47 USR 0).

21 April 2023:
alpha1: Debugged the Nextified ALS 2023, so that it works on the Next, if mostly silently.
Wrote a simple Spectrum program to randomly generate different patterns for a network of red weed. The intention was to take eight of these tiles and make them permanent, but why not have the Next run this routine every time so that it generates a unique set of red weed tiles every game?
Nextified the Spectrum program, converted all the variables and arrays to integer type (that took a while...), altered the colours to the perfect shades of red, brown, pink and orange.
Formed the data into tiles, and arranged them in a randomly-generated 3214 tile map so that the game screen can be displayed instantly.
Further added a routine to generate eight different tiles for the mown weed.

22 April 2023:
alpha2: Added the red weed tile generator to the main program. Rehashed a few of the easier GOSUBs to procedures.
alpha3: Rehashed the setup phase of the program - arrays and machine code are now loaded in from external sources (and generated by the program arrcode.bas).
Reverted the code to having every mower using a single loop, rather than the four working mowers all with their own loop - with a few Nextified changes (such as REPEAT...UNTIL for the keyboard debounce loop).
(There's no going back now after defining the palette. The game works as it did, mostly silently, but all the colours are completely on the piss, even with LAYER 0!)
alpha4: Added title sequence, with a tribute to H.G. Wells, an excerpt of "The Eve Of The War" made with PLAY, and an .SL2 screen. 
alpha5: Started the main menu and had problems with transparent graphics on LAYER 2. Many, many corrections and debuggings to make sure all the colours displayed correctly. 

23 April 2023:
alpha6: Finished the main menu and all the new mower descriptions.
alpha7: Built the main game screen. A photo from the Mars Curiosity Rover helped with the sky colour:
https://solarstory.net/img/articles/big/mars-bonneville-crater-in-color.jpg
Made the game work properly, dropping the random mown weed tiles behind the mower.

24 April 2023:
alpha8: Added the custom character set, remodelled the title screen and the main menu to accommodate it.
Finally read through chapter 18 of the manual, conquered the concept of sprites, and combined the main ALS loop and small fragments of the sprite demo program (p.166-172 of the manual) with some modified graphics from Jet Set Willy II to make an animated sprite of a spaceman with a lawnmower, who walks across the Red Weed landscape, dropping mown weed tiles in the right place (albeit just with a "beep" for now).
alpha9: A bit of prep work - nothing out of the ordinary - to prepare the listing to have the sprite routine dropped in.

25 April 2023:
Remodelled the external sprite routine so that one %x loop can have the mower moving both ways depending on whether %y is odd or even. All the data required to put the sprite in the right place on the right line facing the right direction and stopping and starting in the right place is held in array %m.
The drop-in sprite loop need to be where the old UDG-based routine was, from lines 100 to a maximum of 989 (990 GOTO 2000 must stay).
Also tried John Connolly's 1-bit "hum" effect from the Spectrum ALS 2023... it just makes silence here. I suppose PLAY will do the job, though.
alpha10.bas: The major breakthrough! The sprite routine is added to the main game. Now we're really Mowin' On Mars!
alpha11.bas: Mostly changes "under the bonnet" - reworked the in-game text to be 9 pixels high, and cut it down in length to fit the screen; reworked the procedure to print it. Revised the Martian background.
alpha12.bas: Added the debounce and the squeaky sound to the manual mower.

26 April 2023:
alpha13: Added EXPLOSIONS. The JMC mower has a 50% chance of exploding sometime along the course of the job (accurately calculated to be a 50% chance of happening some time in 1,568 checks, on a spreadsheet - each check needs to be less than the 30th lowest value of RND...) Extra sprites have been added for the nuclear mower, which sports a Mr. Fusion dome that glows when it is near breaking point... and will cool down over time.
This was a long job that required a lot of trial and error, and a lot of testing.
These were useful:
https://publicdomainclip-art.blogspot.com/2014/06/mushroom-cloud-clip-art.html
https://freesound.org/people/ryansnook/sounds/110114/
(.playwav isn't working properly for the Mars-shattering kaboom....)

27 April 2023:
alpha14: Added the sprites of the Martian Fighting Machine... and discovered that .playwav won't work with CSpect and should be given up as a bad job (if I want this to be available to everyone, rather than just those of us who shelled out 300-and-something for limited-edition hardware).
Added the second Bad End with the Wongsworth mower - almost requiring as much strain as getting the last one in.
alpha15: Added a time limit before the red weed starts to grow back. This is when the mid-byte of FRAMES (23673) rolls round to 42, every five seconds, five new weeds will grow and that's curtains for your corned beef sandwich. If FRAMES is accurate this gives 3:35 to complete the job which would be very tight for the manual mower, except it looks like pressing keys slows down FRAMES... or is that just CSpect?

28 April 2023:
alpha16: Added the victory sequence! And also the final failure where you take too long and the Red Weed grows back.
This helped with a not of not-so-science-fiction outro music:
https://www.scribd.com/doc/154941956/John-Patrick-Arr-Nik-Coley-Bullseye-Theme-Music
https://imgv2-1-f.scribdassets.com/img/document/154941956/original/7a0cf9e28c/1587359493?v=1
alpha17: Corrected the last few bugs, or at least the last few I could find.

And that, finally, is a wrap!
