I’ve been creatively crazy the last few weeks since ramping up my Claude usage. Just today I got an almost exact copy of the classic arcade game Spy Hunter feature complete and playing nicely. I’ll do my usual routine of playing with it for a month or so intermittently so I can note any issues that I do spot and have another pass at a later date but it does feel like the full game already.

And it’s not just Spy Hunter I’ve been working on over the last few months:

A classic game from Micro Power originally created for the BBC Micro back in 1983 and then ported onto the C64 the following year where I came across it. This one has been on my radar to recreate since before the millennium, where I was tinkering about with the first versions of Blitz and Blitzmax on Windows. I had a few attempts at it – none of them successfully because, for a galaxians clone, it was a pretty clever bit of code and I was definitely punching out of my box at the time.

Fancy gold/green coloured html version of the classic game, Keno.

I’ve created a new java app that can be built on Mac and Windows and will tidy up your movies Plex database.

You can download the java source and build yourself a copy from https://github.com/LordXerra/Plexible

What happens when you have an idea to write a childrens book with the missus and you pursue the idea all the way to completition?

You become self-published authors. Click more to read what we did.

TLDR: Here’s the obligatory link to our book now available on Amazon for paperback or Kindle.

If that link borks out then try this one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0H66J5KQ7

I’m still playing about with vibe coding and over the weekend I put myself to work on knocking up a couple of quick-ish projects that had been on my spreadsheet of games worked on over the years. Mostly, that is a depressingly long list of failed projects, but I’m one of these OCD people who like to tick off boxes and milestones, so had the idea of maybe actually getting some of these into reality with this new playground to work them in.

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.