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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We wuz broken. TLDR – ok now.

Posted on 22/06/2022 by Xerra

Normal service resumed. I fixed stuff and bonked the hosting provider on the head.

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Validius wins Syntax Bomb competition 10

Posted on 14/11/2020 by Xerra

You’d think I’d want to crow about this at the time but, for some reason, I seem to have forgotten to actually post this here. Anyway, for the 10th Syntax Bomb competition, Validius came top of the pack, which was a great achievement considering how good some of the other games were.

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Posted in Competition, Development, Game Studio 2, Syntax Bomb, Validius | Leave a comment