Author Archives: Xerra

About Xerra

Old school programmer with a serious love of Retro-games. Co-Director of Dexterity Design.

World cup 2006

20 years ago I’d been stirred up with the prospect of an exciting 2006 World Cup and did a bit of blogging about it while we were still in the tournament. I found this on an old hard drive a … Continue reading

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Vibe coding

There’s a huge amount of this going on now – especially amongst You-tubers and casual developers. I’m not going to go into the positives or negatives of actually doing this, just document some of my experiments with it in future … Continue reading

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Gridrunner Devlopment

I’m well overdue now to talk about Gridrunner which was the only game I developed in 2023. Continue reading

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How my games have done in Syntax Bomb competitions – Part Four.

I’ve got so slow in adding to this blog now that I have to do a load of reading old posts and digging through archived threads on Syntax Bomb to remind myself of what I planned to write about. In … Continue reading

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How my games have done in Syntax Bomb competitions – Part Three — 02 January 2024

In my previous post about Syntax Bomb game coding competitions (Part Two) I left off just after mid 2020, where I had finished Validius. The next competition came around October of that year, and had the theme “Go Nuts!”

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Syntax Bomb competition 11 – Go Nuts

One of my more recent games – and I say that casually, as it was actually released in 2020 – was for the 11th Syntax Bomb competition, and had a theme which was simply “Go Nuts!”

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Gridrunner released

I’ve just released my latest game on Itch, which has been written for the Syntax Bomb game competition, Retro 80’s. https://xerra.itch.io/gridrunner I chose to do a remake of Gridrunner & Matrix, of which I have fond memories from my introduction … Continue reading

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Website tidy up

Finally did some tidying up on the old site since it was resurrected from the hosting providers screw up. Here’s what’s changed:

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How my games have done in Syntax Bomb competitions – Part Two

Another post that’s a bit overdue now. I started drafting this back in March, 2021 and it got left half finished in the life-swirl of moving house, changing jobs, moving house again, and general slackness on my part. So today … Continue reading

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Syntax Bomb competition 10 – Reboot

I’m going back a couple of years here, right back to pretty much where we were in the height of the Covid lockdown, as I recall. At the time I started work on Validius, it was around 4 weeks into … Continue reading

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