I'm making a shooting game (similar to space invaders, Raptor or Tyrian) that makes heavy use of bitblt.

It is essential that your ship is able to constantly change colors during the game. Right now, I just go through all the pixels of a bitmap and use GetPixel and SetPixelV to change the colors. But this slows the game down by heaps, especially on older computers.

I'm thinking that I should pre-draw all the pictures while the game is loading, but I don't know how.

How do I do this? Is there a way for VB to make temporary bitmaps to store pictures? How would I draw to them/load from them/delete them?