Misc — Tardis.dk Remakes

Dreams, Delays and Dingos

August 31, 2011 By Sokurah Leave a Comment

Time flies and it takes long between releases because I seem to start more games than I can manage, and then put them on hold when they’re almost done. This year I’ve been working on my Circular Invaders Game but the guy who helped me fine-tune the gameplay suddenly dropped off the face of the Earth so I put that on hold temporarily.

Then I resumed work on X-Quest 2, which is basically done now but only needs new graphics, and I’d found an artist who seemed really good, but he only delivered one frame and now he’s stopped answering my mails. Not good – especially after just being mentioned in issue 93 of Retro Gamer Magazine. Oh well, it’ll get done…only with a delay.

Before them there is a string of other unfinished remakes, but I’ll get to them in time. Slowly, perhaps, but I’ll get to them. I’m especially looking forward to getting back to work on Black Widow and Psycho Pigs UXB, but I can only work effectively on one game at the time.

All these WIP’s, and the stress I’m putting myself under just by thinking about them, is probably the reason I woke up this morning – stressed over some unfinished tank game (no, I’m not working on any tank games, so who knows why ). That’s the third morning in a row that I’ve woken up with a dream like that. Can you see why I would really like to finish all my unfinished WIP’s?

Of course, all these delays frustrates me and I decided to put that frustration to good use and channel all that energy into making a new game (typical…see how easy it happens? ) so I started working on something I’ve wanted to do for almost 30 years – making a new ZX Spectrum game.

And that was the birth of Dingo – a “lost Ultimate game”. I’ve already remade this arcade game back in 2008 for Windows and in 2011 for Mac, but now I’m remaking it again in z80 assembler for the ZX Spectrum. It only took me about a month to make the game and I was lucky enough to atract the attention of Mark R. Jones – who used to work for Imagine and Ocean back in the 80′s – and he has done all the stunning new graphics for the game. The game is currently finished, playable and works as it should, and according to Mark its “stupidly addictive” so I must have done something right.

That being said, the game could still use a bit of spit and polish. I’m currently working on improving the sprite routines (3rd day in a row, argh) and it also needs music and better sound effects, but the plan is to have it completely finished and presented at the retro event, Replay, in Blackpool in November.

You can read more about the development of the game here, and below is a picture of the game.

The Spectrum version of Dingo

Filed Under: Misc, Rant, Remakes Tagged With: Black Widow, Dingo, Neon Invasion Earth, Psycho Pigs UXB, X-Quest 2

Problems downloading games?…not anymore.

July 25, 2011 By Sokurah Leave a Comment

I just had a mail yesterday from a guy who couldn’t download any of my games. That was very unfortunate – especially since the problem has probably been there for 3 weeks (I wonder why I didn’t hear about it earlier?)

The reason this happened is probably because my webhost had problems 3 weeks ago, due to extremely heavy rain which basically drowned their server room. All the surviving servers were moved manually to another hostingcenter and many websites were restored from backup – including mine, but appearantly they’d not restored folder permissions accurately, so that affected the script that handles downloads from the site.

It’s working again now and the games are just waiting to be downloaded. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Filed Under: Misc, Rant, System

YouTube injustice.

March 24, 2011 By Sokurah 1 Comment

I can’t believe it – my YouTube account has been suspended. And why, I hear you ask?

Because I marked some spam as spam (I guess, YouTube isn’t answering my mails).

See, I like this singer – Lenka, and she has this new video out. I made a comment on how cute the video was and how much better this version of the song is – compared to the first version that was released. Pretty harmless stuff…but that’s me – harmless.

A day or so later I had a mail because someone has commented on my post, so I went back to see the comment. That was this joker – TheDoodypants. He seems to be unstable – on a good day – and seems to be nothing but an abusive spammer and the kind of person you’d prefer never to have to deal with. Look at the picture below for some of his replies to the music video. I can’t believe the things he called me – and because I was annoyed I marked about 10 of his replies as spam, but unfortunately my post is now gone because my account is suspended because of it.

I’ve tried writing to YouTube but they don’t answer. All they have to do is take a look at my commenting history and see that I’m not a spammer, I don’t call people names or abuse them, so how can it be that the spamming clown is still there, but my account has been closed…just because I marked some spam? …I mean, I’ve read their Terms of Service several times and as far as I can see I haven’t done a thing wrong – I should theoretically be allowed to mark as much spam as I want – as long as it IS spam.

If this is not the reason they’ve closed my account they could at least tell my why. But not a word. Despite several inquries. This makes YouTube hypocrites. I believe they’ve closed my account unjustified and now they won’t answer me…probably because they know I’m right but won’t acknowledge it.

So, now what? Sure, I can just make a new account, but why should I? I want my uploads back – about 12 videos of my own games, and the biggest loss is probably my favourites (probably not more than 20 so I could find them again), but I don’t like terrorism and this – it’s abuse of power – and I would prefer to have them acknowledge they’ve made a mistake…or at least have the balls to talk to me so we can get past it.

Please Tweet this, post it whereever you can, and help me get a reply from YouTube…and if possible – have my account re-opened. I’m not leaving this be. It’s a matter of principle.

TheDoodypants is the real spammer here - not me.

Filed Under: Misc, Rant Tagged With: Hypocrites, YouTube

Happy New Year 2010/11

December 31, 2010 By Sokurah Leave a Comment

Wow, that was another year…how time flies. I’m not even kidding – just a few days ago I remembered something I’d done recently, but when I thought about it I realised it was more than a year ago. How I long for those days when I was young(er), time crawled and I didn’t have a care in the world. *sigh*

Perhaps one of the reasons time flies by so fast is because I spend so much by my computer programming. Not every project worked on becomes a released game, and other projects are just …erm – delayed, but luckily for my own sake I do manage to finish something once in a while. This year has been enormously stressing because I’ve worked on so many different projects and 9 months into 2010 I still hadn’t finished anything. Kinda makes you wonder what the h*ll you’re doing with your time.

Luckily, by the end of October I had Binary Land ready, followed by The Night Before Christmas just before Christmas and finally Star Castle right before New Year, so having finally been able to release 3 games in 2010 has helped my mood quite a lot, and I hope some of you will find some of what I’ve made entertaining.

Star Castle wasn’t made entirely after The Night Before Christmas btw. I started programming it on December 25th last year and it has been sitting almost finished on my harddrive for about 11 months, so ‘all I had to do was finish it’, so just because something is put on hold doesn’t mean it’s been abandoned. That is also the reason I hope to be able to complete 3 of my work-in-progress projects sometime over the next …err… 6 months. And these are much larger projects than the 3 from 2010.

In other words: Things are looking up and I hope to have a great new year, programming-wise. But I hope to live a little more in 2011 too, and make an effort to be a little happier, because time goes by really fast and before you know of it you’re old (or heading there – fast).

On a less serious note, I made a blog post a while back about spam. I hate it – I really do, and I wouldn’t mind kicking the shit out of the people behind it. At work about 85% of all incoming e-mail is spam – that’s how bad it is. Luckily we have a pretty good filter solution so we don’t think too much about it on a daily basis. Personally, I did get a lot of spam-comments on this blog too, and I tried to combat it by blocking certain IP addresses, but I’m pretty sure that’s what led to some strange behaviour where certain people, who weren’t spammers, couldn’t acccess the site at all, but now that I’m not filtering IP addresses it’s working again. Yes, I know Akismet catches practically all spam comments, but I’d still spend time reviewing them and that annoyed the crap out of me.

However, I don’t get any more spam. The solution was simple, although annoying – I changed the comment system on the blog so anyone who wants to comment has to sign up first. Probably why I haven’t had any comments for months. Oh, well. But it’s not so bad – if anyone want to drop me a comment on a game – be it feedback, requests, or something else, you’re welcome to send me an e-mail. It’s on the About Me page, as well as in all of my ‘readme’ files.

I think that’s it for now. I hope you’ll all have a great New Year, with lots of games made by those of you who likes doing that, and lots of new games for those of you who likes that.

Be safe. See you on the other side.