In the same vein as the last post, I’d like to make note of Flash MOD Player v1.2, written in haXe by Kostas Michalopoulos a.k.a. Bad Sector. I have been meaning to make a few retro arcade games in Flash, but the lack of support for a tracker format was bugging me. With a MOD player, this will help provide that old school feel while also keeping downloads small.

I haven’t yet played around much with this MOD player as I’ve put Flash aside for the moment, but I’ll be looking at this closer when I pick it up again. In the meantime, if you work in Flash and are interested in tracker music, this player might be handy.

I just stumbled across this in a link on the IndieGamer forums: sfxr – an old school sound effects generator. It’s perfect for quickly making simple wave form sound effects, and the GUI has some of the most common ones as presets. I’ve played around with the Mac port for a bit and it’s brilliant.

Sorry about the delay in posts. I’ve really got to get into the habit of making at least two posts a week to this blog. Even if I don’t have a big milestone to report I still have plenty to post about.

This is the first game review to be put in the blog (and incidentally, also the first post not to be put under Blog Babble). My reviews are going to be more along the lines of a critique of the game, focusing on what development tips I have learned from playing it. I’ll briefly cover the point of the game, but the bulk of the review will be comments and thoughts on the details. I might cover whether I think the game is fun enough to be worth getting, but I’m really not the best person to be making that kind of call. I often buy games not because I think they’ll be fun in a traditional sense, but because I want to see how they implemented a feature. It might not be best for me to recommend everyone to buy a game just to see how they integrated radial menus, for example. These reviews also have the benefit of getting me to play through that list of indie games I’ve been writing over the last couple of months and not spend my time just idly flicking through forums. Aimless web browsing has the nice fuzzy illusion of being somewhat worklike, but playing games is actually of greater benefit.

My first review is for a game I’ve been meaning to cover for a while now: Popcap’s Plants vs. Zombies
Read the rest…

My first foray into graphical Python games using pyglet is complete. For a first test, I have made a simulation of the sport of tennis, featuring state-of-the-art ball ricochet physics and ball position matching artificial intelligence.
Read the rest…

Man, I’m bad at this blogging thing. I was planning on making a post every few days; I even had one written for nearly a week ago. But I felt it was lacking something and never posted. Next time I should get something else written; I should get around to writing a proper review to Plants vs. Zombies, plus now Braid’s been released for the Mac I can finally see what all the hullabaloo is about.

What was clear after my blogging brainstorming sessions, and has been increasingly clear this week, is that my most pressing issue is that I’m extremely rusty at game development. I’m running at a much lower efficiency than is required if I’m to have a serious stab at running this as a business. The plan I’ve got jotted out requires a rather high level of creative output, and this requires a level of organisation I need to build. I know it’s achievable; I’ve been there before. It does however require a considerable amount of focus that I need to build.
Read the rest…

I’ve been writing drafts of this post on “strengths and weaknesses”, and they never seem to come out right. There’s no way to avoid discussing my strengths and weaknesses without them coming off as very personal. With me being very new at this, everything seems to come across very badly, almost as if I’m making excuses for my faults or that I’ve got no confidence. That’s only partly true.

It’s certainly been a good exercise, however. I’m not sure how blog worthy the extended rambling of my explanations in my drafts are. But it’s something I still want to post, so I’ll sum up my thoughts with a series of dot point lists.

Read the rest…

To kick start this blog off, I’m going to use this space as a sounding board for settling my thoughts in the right direction. I’m at the start of a bold new venture, and I need to think a few decisions through. For the next week or so, my blog posts will be a sort of discussion with myself, but open to observation and comments from the outside world. Which I guess is the purpose of nearly every other blog, really.

To begin, I’ll start by answering the basic question “who am I?”. This seems easiest to do in an interview style. It’s time for a little chat… with myself.

Read the rest…

Welcome to the new blog, hopefully more improved from the old blog. It’s a blank new slate just waiting for me to fill with juicy content.

And welcome to the new site, which will be more involved than the old site. As the version at the popular dot-com extension, this will grow to be the main business site. For now, it’s opened to be my main blog as I work my way there.
Read the rest…