World cup 2006

Posted on 15/03/2026 by Xerra

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 few years ago so I must have saved it from whatever blog I had at the time, or wrote it in a document before posting it, rather than writing on the fly.

With this post I’ve left the text as is, terrible writing intact. I have got Claude to run over it and tidy up spelling of player names, formatting and punctuation so at least it’s kind of readable now. I’m posting it here for prosperity.

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Vibe coding

Posted on 08/03/2026 by Xerra

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 blog posts. I’ve been finding the process fun, interesting and it’s definitely taken my productivity through the roof, although I do get that a lot of developers – especially the old-school who’ve been at it 20+ years – believe that it’s lazy and a bad practice long-term.

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Gridrunner Devlopment

Posted on 27/01/2026 by Xerra

I’m well overdue now to talk about Gridrunner which was the only game I developed in 2023. It evolved from what turned out to be the last competition the website Syntax Bomb hosted and I developed it over 3 months, from October to early December.

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

Posted on 19/01/2025 by Xerra

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 the last post I closed off stating that there wouldn’t be another Syntax Bomb competition until May, 2022 but it actually all kicked off in February of that year.

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

Posted on 02/01/2024 by Xerra

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

Posted on 02/01/2024 by Xerra

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

Posted on 05/12/2023 by Xerra

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 to gaming via a Commodore Vic 20 back in 1983.

I will do a game development post on creating the game at a later date.

[EDIT] Gridrunner won 2nd place in the Syntax Bomb “Best of the 80’s” game coding competition.

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Website tidy up

Posted on 07/07/2022 by Xerra

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

Posted on 28/06/2022 by Xerra

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 I finally got around to picking it up again.

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Posted in Competition, Creepy Crawlies, Damnation Alley, Development, Game Studio 2, Syntax Bomb, Validius | Leave a comment

Syntax Bomb competition 10 – Reboot

Posted on 23/06/2022 by Xerra

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 the Reboot competition and I’d been toying with an idea about creating a simulated cluedo-style game using the old Bah,Humbug! framework with a theme of murder in an office. It was quite an ambitious game idea, and i’m still not done with it yet, but i’ll talk more about that another day.

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