Happy New Year

That was the year that was, goodbye 2011, hello 2012.

December 30, 2011 By Sokurah

The year 2011 is almost over and it’s time to look at what happened during the course of it.

Around this time last year I decided that my only (game related) New Year’s resolution would be to make three games in 2011, and now – one year later – I have to admit that I didn’t manage it…not really anyway. I didn’t make any new PC games this past year (how the hell did that happen?), but I did port 9 of my PC games to the Mac OSX platform, so hopefully that makes up for it.

Around november I began working on a new Christmas game (Buggerman: The Xmass Heist) – which would be my third year in a row doing that – but not only have I spent less time programming the last two months than I expected, I’ve also run into problems coding it which has unfortunately delayed it past Christmas. Oh well. I think I’ve figured those things out now and I expect it to be finished in January.

I did make one new game this year, though. After wanting to make a ZX Spectrum game for more than 25 years I finally decided to do it and I chose to make a Spectrum version of the arcadegame Dingo by A.C.G. (aka. Ultimate Play The Game). Not having touched z80 assembler language for more than 20 years I threw myself into it and made progress in no time, which caught the attention of Mark R. Jones who used to work for Ocean & Imagine Software back in the late 80’s, and he offered to help out with with the graphics. And it ended up looking very nice too. 🙂

The game was finished in time for the early November Replay Expo in Blackpool – which we decided would be the release of the game – and I went over there to promote the game and to meet Mark for the first time. We sold a very limited run of the game on cassette – all numbered and signed by the both of us, and the game has been recieved fantastically well and gotten almost only good reviews (like, here, here, here & here).

I’ve been featured a couple of times in Retro Gamer Magazine this year too. In February (I think), my remake of Star Castle was “Remake of the Month” (my second game to earn that title – the first was Omega Race 2009). Later in the year my upcoming remake of X-Quest 2 was mentioned, but that was delayed and I hope to finish it in 2012 instead. Finally Dingo was featured in a two-page making-of/interview feature in their November issue. Dingo was also mentioned in GamesTM Magazine.

So, New Year’s resolutions for 2012? Easy…make (at least) three games. 🙂 …possibly a new Spectrum game too.

So stick around and visit once in a while – I’m sure I’ll have new things to offer. And please do send me a mail if you like what I’m doing.

For now I would like to wish a Happy New Year to all my visitors. May you have a great year full of good experiences.

Filed Under: Misc, News Tagged With: Buggerman, Dingo, Happy New Year, OSX

Happy New Year 2010/11

December 31, 2010 By Sokurah

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... 😉

Filed Under: Misc Tagged With: Happy New Year

Happy new year 2009/2010

December 31, 2009 By Sokurah

The New Year is nearly upon us and I just wanted to write a little something about the past year before the booze goes in and the brains go out. This will be a more traditional New Year for me than last year where I was in Cambodia, but this year I’m not travelling and will celebrate with friends at home.

Development wise, the past year has been very productive for me. Three games developed in 2009 and another two pretty advanced (but slightly stalled) WIP’s in development – Psycho Pigs UXB & Horace in the Mystic Woods – means I haven’t been wasting too much time. If I’m cheeky and include December of last year I can add another three games to that list – Zektor, Space Fury & Dingo, although to be fair they were made in the three months before December. Still, that’s six games in about 16 months – that’s basically half my entire output. Busy, busy, busy.

I was even approached for an interview by Retro Gamer Magazine which resulted in an interview in their July 2009 issue as a ‘Homebrew Hero‘. The cool thing about that is that, not only have I been subscribing to the magazine for 5 ears, but also because I was now featured in a column when a lot of other people I admire have appeared.

Programming wise I hope 2010 won’t be as busy. My plan is to finish the 3 WIP’s I have started (the third being X-Quest 2) and hopefully not be too distracted by new projects along the way.

I hope you all had a great Christmas and it that you’ll enter the New Year safely and surrounded by friends or family…and that your hangover will only last a very short time.

Stay safe…and come back soon.

/Soks.

…and because it’s all about remaking I’ll just re-post the same picture I used two years ago. 🙂