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!”
(more…)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 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.
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 I finally got around to picking it up again.
(more…)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 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.
(more…)Validius wins Syntax Bomb competition 10
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.
(more…)99 Crazy ways to order a pizza
Pretty sure I’ve had the text of this post from some time in the early to mid nineties when I first started surfing the good old interweb on my trusty Amiga 1200 via Demon Internet. I’m keeping it here as it was one of the first amusing things I read online back then, and also served to confirm my suspicions that one day the Internet is going to be 99% stuff like this and adverts and maybe the rest will actually hold useful information. Still, who cares. As long as it’s funny then who gives a shit now?
(more…)
How my games have done in Syntax Bomb competitions – Part One
I can’t believe I’ve not actually published about this before but I’ve properly released seven games on Itch in just over two years and six of them were for Syntax Bomb competitions. Nowhere have I actually mentioned much about how they have done in these competitions so I really should rectify that now.
(more…)Boulderdash finally finished
I started working on a Boulderdash remake back in 2017 and it was pretty much one of my first games that I worked on solo after I switched to working with Gamemaker Studio 2.
(more…)Validius released
My latest game, Validius, was release today on Itch.io
This game was written for the Syntax Bomb Reboot competition and took 8 weeks to create. You can download it for either PC or Mac here: Validius
Time to start work on a new game
I’ve been thinking about starting a new game outside of the competition ones that I’ve been doing for the last couple of years finally.
The deadlines that have been imposed from writing competition games has increased my productivity massively during this time and, for the Six competitions I worked on a game, I delivered for Five of them. I even got placed Third and First in two of them which was a massive boost aside from just getting the games themselves completed.
(more…)