Parallels and Gamemaker Studio 2

Posted on 07/02/2017 by Xerra

Tinkering with side-projects like Mancala has taken a back seat over the last week, despite my previous raving about wanting to get back into Blitzmax once again. Aaron and I discussed the relative merits of using something huge like Unity for Paradroid and we ended up deciding that it’s overkill for the type of game we’re trying to recreate, and probably for the types of games we usually prototype or develop as well.

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Posted in Development, Game Studio 2, Mancala, Paradroid | Leave a comment

Polishing the blog

Posted on 23/01/2017 by Xerra

I took the opportunity to do a little housekeeping on the blog today which ended up with me getting my hands dirty with some raw html again. Very basic stuff in the end, and the kind of stuff I used to do in my sleep in the mid 90’s when we had nothing else to do it all for us. But, like everything else, you forget it all, when you have everything spoon fed to you. Tools like WordPress actually make it pretty easy to do most of what you want, it was just being stubborn that made me do it the hard way to get a couple of linked images in the side bar.

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Posted in Paradroid, Website, Writing | Leave a comment

Putting it all on screen

Posted on 22/01/2017 by Xerra

With a mocked up game board in place it’s straight onto probably the hardest part of the project, which is handling all the objects needed for the game. There are 14 holes to keep track of on the board, and 48 pegs. We need to know the hole location of each of those pegs, the x and y positions of them on screen, the status of these pegs (as they could be moving between holes) and what kind of pegs they actually are.

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Posted in Blitz, Development, Mancala | Leave a comment

Mancala & stepping back in time.

Posted on 15/01/2017 by Xerra

Today was possibly the most productive day I’ve had programming in possibly as much as a year. If any of it is of practical benefit, apart from the pursuit of knowledge and keeping the mind sharp, I’d very much doubt, but I like to think that any time spent in front of the computer putting code together, working with development systems, and just generally plugging away at getting it right is always a good thing.

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Posted in Blitz, C#, Development, Mancala | Leave a comment

Getting the basics right

Posted on 13/01/2017 by Xerra

The reason for developing our Paradroid project is primarily a learning exersise in how to “Unity”

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Posted in Development, Paradroid, Unity | Leave a comment

Project Paradroid

Posted on 30/12/2016 by Xerra

When creating Paradroid back in the early eighties, Andrew Braybrook created a masterpiece. A game consistently rated as one of the greatest games ever written on the C64, and also one of the most fun to play.

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Posted in Development, Paradroid, Unity | Leave a comment

Moving forward. New technology and terminated games.

Posted on 30/12/2016 by Xerra

I originally wrote this entry back in October but, as it wasn’t finished at the time, I didn’t get to actually put it online. As we’re up and running with something again – more on this next post – it’s time to put my house in order again.

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Posted in Blitz, Development, Gravity Force, Infection, SpriteKit, Swift, Unity | Leave a comment

Writing your way to being remotely interesting…

Posted on 09/11/2015 by Xerra

I’ve decided that it’s infinitely easier to actually write a blog, rather than so-called professional writing for projects.

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Posted in Blitz, Writing | Leave a comment

Infection

Posted on 21/10/2015 by Xerra

Welcome back to my ramblings, if you’re a previous reader, and an even bigger welcome if you’re new here via our website, or however else you have found me.

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Posted in Blitz, Development, Infection | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The evolution of iDef

Posted on 29/09/2015 by Xerra

So, almost two weeks on from the last posting, here’s where Dexterity Design are right now: 

Aaron has stopped messing with maze testing and tinkering with asteroids to help out with my little project. He’s now neck deep in iDef code again doing the conversion into SpriteKit. This is being done because conditions can be set in Swift source code to compile certain sections of code only if compiling for a particular platform which gives all sorts of power to bring it to more people.

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Posted in Development, SpriteKit, Swift | Leave a comment