Author Archives: john
Old School Shooter
Last month I was approached to see if I could help out with a small project at Derwen College , a college for adults with various learning difficulties. One of their students, Adam Walker had drawn some graphics with the idea they could be used in a game to be played by everyone at their upcoming Online Safety Day. The main character, ‘Ebot’, was to move left and right shooting oncoming baddies that descend like the original space invaders. The players would have a large range of abilities so the game had to start off very easy but could quickly get more difficult. We also needed to keep a record of the best player scores as prizes may be awarded on the day. Emma the E-Safety coordinator was attempting to get something together with Buildbox but it was clear that she … Continue reading
New Year, New List.
For the last thirty years I’ve often found myself making a New Year’s list of what I (and my studio/company) should achieve in the year ahead. It usually takes the form of a brief outline of achievements and failures of last year and a more aspirational list for the coming one. So long as I didn’t beat myself up too much, this always seemed a good idea. I like writing lists. List’s feel productive, they can focus the mind and help reduce distractions. Of course writing a list is just another way of putting off doing whatever is on the list but hey it’s Christmas, I like writing lists. So yesterday I started a New Year list again. New Year, New Optimism. But this time I’d only just started when I had an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, I started … Continue reading
It’s good to do something different.
Just back from Sheffield and KrebsFest for which I developed a simulation-like game where bugs multiply and phagocytes (aka white blood cells) attempt to eat them up. The action was projected large against the wall of the University’s Firth Court and actually controlled by the assembled masses waving red or green glow-sticks. It certainly made a change to my usual projects. A good bit was the simulation itself. I really enjoy creating simple rule sets for my game characters and just letting them make their own way within their environment and they don’t get much simpler than bacteria. I was using Unity to develop the game and it’s object orientated approach fitted nicely with the concept of independent cells. So I created a basic bacteria that could reproduce itself a limited number of times and provided a variable that dictated the rate of this reproduction. Once … Continue reading