Pigs…pigs everywhere.

My my, now time flies. 6 weeks since my last post but my only excuse is that I’ve been too busy programming to post. 😉

The development of the game has caught the eyes of Retro Gamer Magazine and it was mentioned in issue 62, but in their…excitement…they managed to get a lot of facts wrong – including my name which became (name here).

Click here to see the magazine article.

Oh, well, it was good for a laugh and the editor did say ‘sorry‘ so that’s okay. 😉 Now I just have to concentrate on the game and make it as good as I can so it can earn a review once it’s finished. There’s still a long way to go but the game is really coming together and looking better and better daily (or whenever I can be arsed to work on it). 😉

Anyway,  I’m currently only working on the singleplayer mode and although I haven’t quite decided if I’m doing a multiplayer mode yet, I’m programming it in a way that it’ll be as easy as possible to add in another player when I’m closer to being finished (although it may not be that easy – multiplayer mode is a ‘bug-magnet‘)… but it won’t be considered until I’m 100% satisfied with the singleplayer mode.

I won’t go into detail with what’s already finished and what’s still missing but I’m starting to have a good feeling about it – like I said…it’s really coming together as a game and I expect to be able to give my artist an early demo of the game in a couple of weeks. By then it’ll still be far from finished, but making a demo must mean there’s something to show off, right? 😉

I just made a screenshot from my current build, where you can see a new background, some more enemies, a few special items and the dino-suit powerup the player can wear, which makes the player able to withstand a single hit from a bomb…plus – it looks impossibly cute. 😀

Screenshot from the latest build of the game.

Screenshot from the latest build of the game.

Spam, viruses and malware…I hate it.

Gahh, the server was hacked on saturday and I didn’t see it until monday afternoon.
A small piece of code had been inserted in all ‘index.htm‘ and ‘index-php‘ files, so that when pages were accessed they would try to download some malware onto the users computer. But it’s gone now…until it happens again of course. 🙁

I hope you weren’t affected by it.

I’m not taking the attack personal – the exact same thing happened at work – same piece of code and the exact same time, so clearly it’s some sort of bot that did the damage. Now, I’m a peaceful person, but I’d really like to deal out some pain to those people who program viruses, trojan horses and other forms of malware. Yeah, I’d like to take a baseball bat to their knees (or even better – to their hands) and crush every bone in them…and I wouldn’t feel the least bit bad about it. I’d go to bed smiling, and you’d love me for what I’d done – just admit it. 😉

Meanwhile, I’m making progress on Psycho Pigs. It still looks mostly the same but there’s a bit more code written.
I’ll make another update when there’s more to tell.

Competition results and a new game being made.

Finally, a new update…but there’s something to tell. 🙂

The 3 games I made for the Retro Remakes 2008 Competition, Space Fury, Zektor & Dingo, scored as number 4, 8 & 9 respectively. Granted, it’s only out of 21 games, but they’re in the good half…and a 4th place is definitely not bad.
Why don’t you download them – if you haven’t already done so? 😉

I’m also working on a new game – Psycho Pigs UXB. Originally an arcade game from 1987 (called ‘Butasan‘), it was also released for the Spectrum, Amstrad, C64 & X68000 systems in 1988 as ‘Psycho Pigs UXB‘. It’s a frentic singlescreen action game, for one or two players. In a nutshell, you pick up bombs and throw them against enemy pigs, while avoiding getting hit yourself, until you’re the only one left. A bit like Bomberman except you can move around the entire screen.

I’ve been working on the game for about two weeks now and I’m lucky enough to have an
artist helping me out with the graphics, Lobo, which is why I have this purdy piccy to show.

12 seconds from flying roast pork.

12 seconds from flying roast pork.

There’s still a long way to go yet, but I’ll post updates when I have something interresting to tell. 🙂

YEAH!!!…3 games completed!

Wow, this feels pretty good. I don’t have to biggest output of games – one, perhaps two games a year, and now I’ve made 3 games in 3 months and that’s pretty impressive if I must say so myself…and I do feel pretty proud of having produced 3 pretty solid new retro remakes in such a short time…
…but how do YOU feel about them?…let me know by leaving a comment on their respective pages.

The 3 games are of course made for the Retro Remakes 2008 Big Competition (go there if you don’t know what it is) and the 3 games, Zektor, Space Fury & Dingo are NOW available from their respective pages which is found in the menu above, or by clicking the links above.

Special thanks goes to: Oddbob, InfamousUK & Rich Douglas who all contributed to the audio part of the games.

You’re welcome to leave any questions or remarks about the games. Just do it here. 🙂

It’s been a busy 3 months but now I can finally take some time off to go on vacation and that’s exactly what I’ll do. Later today I’ll hop on a plane and go backpacking in asia for 7 weeks.