Happy New Year 2010/11

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.

Almost ready... 😉

New game completed: Star Castle

I mentioned before Christmas that I would have a new game ready before the end of the year, and here it is – a remake of that old Cinematronics vector graphics classic ‘Star Castle‘.

I originally started this game right after Christmas 2009 and worked on it for about 3 weeks before I got distracted by something else, so the game has been on hold for 11 months, but I thought that now was the time to finally finish it.

I hope you like the finished game…I’m sure you will if you like glowy shooters. 🙂

Please leave some feedback or send me a mail if you like it, or if there’s things you feel could be improved.

Click picture to go to download page.

New old WIP: Star Castle

I made three games in 2008, three games in 2009 and since I’ll be trying to finish some of my current WIP’s instead of constantly starting new ones, I know I’ll make (at least) three games in 2011, but for a moment I was worrying if I would be able to finish as many games in 2010. Silly really – as no ones telling me I should absolutely release that many games a year, but once you get an idea into your head it can be hard to forget it. 😉

Luckily I had an almost finished remake of the old Atari vector graphics game, Star Castle – from 1980, knocking around, that I decided I could easily finish before the year is over, so that’ll be my third and final game this year.

Yay. 🙂

So, stay tuned for one more game before the year is over – this time a nice and glowy space-shooter. 🙂

Logo

Titlelogo. Click to read more.

Finished: The Night Before Christmas

Just three days later than I’d hoped for (but at least still before Christmas ;)) I’m happy to present my latest game called ‘The Night Before Christmas‘.

It’s not a remake but instead an original game inspired by several retrogames – especially  ‘Elevator Action‘…although it plays quite differently. It’s what I call ‘a quickie’ so development has only taken a little under a month, but it’s really festive and I hope you will find it fun to play. It starts pretty easy, but soon becomes very frantic.

Download it here, or click here to read more about the game and how it’s played.

Titlescren - click to see the rest.