I’ve made a bunch of games, and some of them are really old. I’m talking 30+ years old, which is a bit trippy really. Lots of people who played the games back then, are grown up now and love to reminisce about the good old days. And they were good. Fast forward and here I am, still making games and doing interviews about the good old games I’ve made.
Arcade Attack did a text and podcast interview with me a few weeks back and have just published it over on their site..
If you’ve not checked out the game I’m working on, take a look over on our website. We have a cool avatar and wallpaper pack for signing up for our monthly newsletter 🙂
Following on from my previous post about hacking the dark theme on VS 2017, I thought I’d share another useful trick for making the WordPress Admin Dashboard nice and dark and easy on the eyes. There are various addons for Chrome that will let you invert the screen (Deluminate), or modify a page’s CSS (Stylebot), but none really fully work the WordPress Dashboard for various reasons.
So, enter Stylish, a really cool addon that allows you to wholesale replace the CSS for a site or page or domain. There are tons of user made themes being shared, and you can get dark versions of most of the major sites. It’s easy to create your own styles for your own needs too.
This is how to turn all your WordPress dashboards into a beautiful, restful and dark experience.
I’ve been working on a new game for the past year and we’re now a month or so from being at Alpha. This means most everything is in and done, barring polish, bug fixing, game balance and progression, and the trillion other tiny bits and bobs that need to be done to call the game finished.
We’re aiming for a Q4 2017 release on Steam. We’re hopeful we’ll make it. I put a video together to show off some of the game play. I hope you like it..
So, as usual I wasn’t paying attention to this site, and it got “hacked”. I’d read about the WordPress REST API vulnerability a couple weeks ago and I made a point of updating my various WordPress sites. I completely forgot about this one. Typical. I updated and rolled back the silliness that they injected into the various posts. Seems there’s money in selling Cialis. I’m in the wrong business.
Anyway, looks like the site was being messed with quite a bit over the past few days. Here’s a grab of the various people who vied for the #1 post on the site..
Starts with my ironic “The Only Thing That is Constant is Change” post, and then BALA SNIPER comes in and breaks some stuff. They were obviously the best of the lot, because they were there first. Then s/he/it adds in some actual content. Much betterer!
.. Then it’s Imam’s turn, but it’s OK because s/he/it did their work with LOVE.
.. Next up is chinafans (I’m now firmly a china fan too), closely followed by GHoST61. This guy is cool because he used a lowercase ‘o’ in his name.
.. But wait, don’t count chinafans out of the race just yet! They come back strong with 2 changes. Seems they deeply care about typography and added some paragraph HTML tags in their second edit.
Then it’s Dr.Silnt Hill, followed by SA3D HaCk3D, and then GeNErAL HaCkEr… and finally, Dr.Silnt Hill .. again.
Phew! That’s dedication! These guys really mean business! The putting-pharmacy-ads-on-people’s-websites business must be super competitive!
Anyway, thanks for making me stay up late fixing your mess. You guys are the b3sTest!
I don’t update this site often, and I always get a kick out of reading the last few posts, sometimes years old, and having a laugh at my sincere naivety. It also makes me cringe a little, to read about stuff that just never panned out for one reason or another. Oh well, such is life.
Take my post about being a “Born Again Indie”. All very true, no dispute there, but shortly after that, things changed yet again, and then again and god knows how many times after that. Opportunities arose, and distractions tugged at me from every direction. Shiny, interesting things that all demanded little pieces of my mind, to greater and lesser extents.
The game I mentioned in that post was a top down, 2D, Egyptian themed dungeon crawler, RPG. It was actually going quite well, and then I had some problems with the artist I had teamed up with, and the whole thing just sucked all the wind out my sails. I sulked for a bit, and then, despite myself, I dipped my toe back into iOS and mobile for a few months, finally releasing one of my shelved iOS games. And then the game got swallowed by the App Store, and I got sad about mobile again and went back to the drawing board.
Then, about 8 months ago, I was having coffee with my good friend, and we were talking about the games we’d like to make. We do this regularly. We sit and torture ourselves with fantastical ideas and fantasies of RPGs and Dungeon Crawlers, and we always say we need to make something, but circumstances are always against us.
This time was different. This time, we were both in a position to commit some real time to a long project. We kicked around ideas and we toyed with making a small, quick game, and even a mobile game. But we kept coming back to our favorite things. Playing D&D, RPGs and Dungeon Crawlers. So we started to define our ultimate dungeon crawler game, constrained by the limitations of our dev resources (just 2 of us). We came up with something we both got excited about. By the end of our coffee, we were totally into the idea and decided to proceed by making a fully playable, polished prototype, to prove out the game’s viability as a full project.
We chose Unity to make the game, and we spent the next 3 months on the prototype. Quite a long time for a prototype, but our mandate was for all the system created would be production ready and usable in the actual project. No cutting corners and no temp or bought code and art. We developed a custom toolset around the Unity editor, and I built a number of highly flexible systems and game mechanics, that allowed Damon to do his thing, and put all his energy into making art and building dungeons and enemies and puzzles.
We quickly realized that Unity was a fantastic choice, and our strategy for simplicity with massive flexibility, was the correct one. Things came together quickly and easily, and we were both having a blast. Once the prototype was ready, we enrolled a bunch of people in a play test. We set up a SurveyMonkey questionnaire for our testers to fill out, rating everything we could think of and offering the chance to give us real, honest feedback. The play test went very well and the data we got back was incredibly valuable. We got some excellent insight into some of our best and worse mistakes and assumptions. Based on the feedback we got, we decided to move ahead with the full project, and spent a few weeks making adjustments to the design and laying out story and detailed design for the entire game.
We kicked off the project officially at the beginning of August. We’re coming up to 2 months in and the project is going really, really well. We’re both still excited about the project, which for a couple of cynical old gits like us, is something new. We meet for coffee and plan and design and figure out problems. We’re heads down right now, building and testing and refining our tools and systems. In a month or so, I’ll be putting a website together for the game, and I’ll be doing some sort of regular game blog update thing. If you’re a real person, and not a bot or an Eastern European or Korean spammer, I hope you’ll join us and follow along. I’ll let you know when things kick off.
Meanwhile, here’s a couple of videos from the prototype.
I finally found the source code to the Batman Returns project on Sega CD. Yay! I know I’ve been teasing you with the dead link on the archive page for so long, and I’m sorry. The package is now live and ready to download for you delight and amusement.
Please link to the page and not the file. For educational purposes only. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
Hey pop pickers! I launched another new web site a couple of weeks ago. It’s called Mused and is full of all sorts of silliness I find on the web. There are movies and video and music and pictures, and pretty much anything else I find entertaining.
Be warned, my tastes are somewhat eclectic, and some say mildly offensive at times, so there you go.
