The game was almost done…but there was something missing – it’s was too…simple.

So a couple of betatesters were drafted and asked for feedback and boy – did I get a lot.

So the game has changed quite a lot now. Visually it’s still pretty much the same, but I work on it almost every day and it’s getting better and better. It now has custom waveformations, introduction levels, challenges and things like that, so it’s worth the extra development time as it’s becoming a better game…and that’s really what it’s all about.

Here’s a newer picture. It’s a couple of weeks old, but it looks better than the previous picture.

Lots of things flying around in this picture. Note: the yellow triangles are no longer yellow triangles, but spiffy shield-looking powerups.

I haven’t decided on a final name yet, so I’m temporarily calling it ‘Tempestuous Spherical Invaders‘, but that will most likely change.

This is what I call ‘a quickie’. I started it a few weeks ago because it seemed like it would be a fun little project, and I’m keeping it a small project so I don’t expect it to take more than a few weeks before it’s finished (but I know I keep saying that about every game I’m working on ).

It’s basically Space Invaders – but played on a sphere. You move your base around the Earth and shoot at the approaching Invaders. To make it a bit more fun I’m adding a bunch of power-ups like different cannons, beam-weapons, shields and stuff like that, but I’m keeping this project small so I can get back to Black Widow again.

If you want to read more, go here.

Meanwhile, here’s a few pictures to look at;

Work in progress. Notice the new 4th invader. It's a cat. We love cats.

The beam-weapon in effect. Also, you have a shield too.
Also shown - the readout showing you how much longer you have your powerup.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, that I’m working on a remake of the Atari ST classic Oids, since I posted about it 1½ month ago. It’s coming along nicely, although I have nothing new and exiciting to tell about it. The primary reason for this paragraph is to say that I’ve now added the game to the “Works in Progress” menu at the top.

Better late than never, eh?

Another new game that I’ve also started working on, and added to the “Works in Progress” menu, is Black Widow. Yes, another glowing wireframe game.

The original was made by Atari in 1982 and I’ve been working on this remake a little over a month now and it will probably be the next game to be finished.

There’s a development screenshot below – click it to see the full version – or go to the Black Widow page to see a few more pictures.

I’ve just updated Jack’o'Roid to v1.3, and just like I also did with my first version of Omega Race – I’ve made it more arcadecabinet friendly. I hope those people who uses arcadecabinets will like the changes to the menusystem. No other changes - I didn’t do online highscores in it this time, though.

Now that I have your attention I have two more things I’d like to get off my chest;

• A while back I recieved a couple of mails from a guy who took the time out to make new samples for Zektor and Space Fury. Thank you! I liked the new samples, and was going to use them, but they were in small pieces that were of no use to me and I couldn’t be arsed to stitch them together so I could use them in the format I needed them to be in. Unfortunately I never got back to the guy and I’m sorry about that. If you’re still out there, and still interrrested, you’re welcome to write to me again and then we can do it right.
• I’ve put Oids on hold for a little while. Not for long though, but I just found a new game that I just had to remake and I’ve been working on that for two weeks now. It’s really coming along a great speed and I can’t wait to show it to people, but because I’ve got as many projects in the pipeline as I have, I haven’t written anything about it – except for this – and won’t do so until it’s done…but that should be before the month is over…I hope.

I’ll keep working on the two, or three, thursdays in a week.

Some of the reasons for remaking it again is that I wanted a game that looked better, played better and was more arcadecabinet-friendly. The menu-system in the original version was a bit wonky as a result of my just-as-wonky programming style back then.

But surprisingly the first version still gets a lot of downloads and last week I recieved request to make the menu more arcadecabinet-friendly. So I did.

I’ve now updated the game to v1.2 which has 2 things changed from the original version;

• The “Do you want to exit? Y/N” requesters has been changed so they now work with the arrow and firekeys. That means that the keys are more standard and you don’t have to remap the Y & N keys if you’re running the game in an arcade cabinet. The menu is still a bit wonky…but at least it’s better now.
• I’ve implemented online highscores so you can now compare your scores with other player’s scores. The scores that are downloaded when you sync the score are not saved locally though, so to fill out the list you have to sync after running the game. It was a bit of a rushjob so I wouln’t be surprised if there are bugs, but if you find any please let me know.

The updated game can be downloaded by going to its page, >here<.

Anyway, as you may have noticed by now I like “spaceshooters”,
and one game I’ve been thinking of remaking for a long time is OIDS.

I don’t like all aspects of OIDS though*, so I’ve been thinking that I wanted instead, at some point, to make a game that was a bit like OIDS…but “my own”. So, one evening – not too long ago – I decided to start writing a few routines that could serve as a framework for a game like this someday.

Well, that was a month ago…and I haven’t stopped to take a break since.

* I’ve been playing the original Start ST game a lot, and a bit on the Mac version too, and now I must say that I’ve definitely come to appreciate to things about the original game I didn’t like originally.

Anyway, I’m currently working almost everyday on remaking the original Atari ST version and I must say that it’s coming together just nicely. I don’t know how long it’ll take me to make it, as it’s got a sh*t load of levels and that takes time to do, but so far I’m having a lot of fun making it, so hopefully it won’t take too long. I’m sure this’ll be my next remake though.

I’ve come up with a nice silhouetted look for the game, but basically it’s just the Atari graphics with a gradient background, and since these pictures are a just works in progress I think it’s safe to say that the graphics will probably change – one way or the other – before the game is done, but for now they’re giving me something to work with so I can concentrate on the code instead of the graphics.

Here’s a few pictures of the game as it looks now.

I’ll post further news about the game over at Retro Remakes.

Well, about a week ago I bought myself a nice and shiny 15″ MacBook Pro – the new core i7 model, and now everyone I know with Mac’s are making fun of me. Hehe, I guess I walked in to that one.

So, why have a done it? A glutton for punishment?…very likely, but no. A while back I installed OSX on my HP laptop but it only works mostly fine – the USB ports doesn’t work and that’s a bit annoying – especially since the plan is to get into developing software for the iPhone and what good is a dev enviroment if I can’t get my software onto the phone easily, right?

…so I decided to buy a real Mac. Hopefully that means less hassle.

I won’t be switching completely to OSX though. The PC and Windows will still be my primary enviroment so the Mac will be mostly for compiling OSX and iPhone projects (when I get to that).

Hopefully I will also (finally) get around to making OSX versions of my games. I successfully compiled and played Omega Race 2009 on the Mac a few days ago but that also only works mostly fine. There’s a strange bug that affects the background picture, and my code for online scores doesn’t work on OSX and I’d like to sort that out before doing “re-releases”.

Let’s see what happens, and when…

Do you know who Dr. Tim Langdell is? If the answer is ‘yes’ then I won’t have to tell you how nutty he is, but if the answer is ‘no’ then you may want to go here and read up on him.

In short: He used to run a software house back in the 80′s but hasn’t don’t much in the way of releasing software since then, because one day he apparently woke up and thought it was a better idea to run his company by using psychological terror and sue people left and right over the rights to games released through his company, instead of actually releasing software. The man is very protective of his trademarks…even if he doesn’t actually own them. Sometimes there’s a fine line between being eccentric and plain nutty, and he’s crossed that line by leaps and bounds. He calls himself a doctor, but he’s clearly more the patient type.

Several remakes has been shut down due to his threats, so in a moment of defiance I decided to remake a game that was originally released by his company, which is something he don’t like, but I don’t take kindly to screwlooseyness(tm) and didn’t care. Well, I cared enough to invent a new author, Dr. Bacon (which is kind of a dual in-joke since Mr. Langdell calls himself a doctor and I’m currently working on a remake of Psycho Pigs UXB) and a new blog to put it on, but I’m now ‘coming out of the closet’ , as I’m quite proud of my Starbike remake.

So, yeah, I did it and now I’m moving my remake from its old home to here.

The whole idea was to see if he noticed the game and would go on to sue me, so I could earn myself a cease and desist order, which I would’ve promptly awarded with a ‘p*ss off w*anker’ letter (which is why I used an alias as a buffer – y’know…deniability and all that), but it’s been 5 months now and he’s probably too busy with his Electronic arts lawsuit. Well, he could still notice it and sue me anyway, but then Ill just have to tell him the same thing – just as myself.

So, grab the game while you can. Not that I expect it to ‘go away’ – even if I’m ordered to remove the game I can still send people a link in an email, right?

One comfort I have, in case the nutty professor doctor decides to take his marital problems out on me, is that I’ve been in contact with Paul Curtis, the programmer of the original game, and he’s certain that the rights to the game belongs to him, and I have his blessings to release this game.

So there.

Click picture to goto the download link.

Well, Stephen Cargill is the original programmer, of the great 16K platform game, Sir Lancelot for the ZX Spectrum back in 1984. It is, as far as I can tell, his first game, and it was also my first remake (and just first game in general) back in 2004.

This is what Stephen Cargill looked like in 1985. I'm sure he looks different now...I know I do.

It was nice to hear from a programmer I admired back then. Indeed, I still play the Spectrum version of Sir Lancelot once in a while. He told me this about my remake;

“I have just found your remake of it and wanted you to know that I think you have done a great job of it“.

That really made my week.

…stay tuned – I hope to have the next update up in under a week.

Three weeks into it and I’ve made the decision to abandon my Alien PBeM game before I sink too much time into it.

Several reasons:

I’ve already spent a lot of time on it, and I really like how many of the things work quite well so far, but the structure of the whole thing, and me not planning things out too well in the beginning and just charging ahead with it, has made the source a bit messy already, and I’m not looking forward to keep adding to it.

But I’m just not feelin’ the love for this project and I’d rather work on something I really want to do, than to keep working on something I find it hard to believe I’ll be satisfied with in the time I have for it. I’m getting slightly depressed by the thought of having to work on this for another 6 weeks.

Luckily I’m my own boss though. So for now it’s abandoned. It pains me, but perhaps I’ll resurrect it later. Who knows.

The good thing is that I can now get back to projects I feel a lot move love for, like….well, just looks above.