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.
(more…)Emerald Keno
Fancy gold/green coloured html version of the classic game, Keno.
(more…)Plexible
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
(more…)The Tomato Dream
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
(more…)Clearing up some old ideas
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.
(more…)Revenge of the Quadra
During 2024 I had decided to work on yet another game I’d been thinking about creating for years. A Vic 20 one as well. Who’d have thought that my mind would be coming around to knocking out another one of those. As it turned out, it would be the only game I fully completed and made public that year.
(more…)Vibe coding
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.
(more…)Gridrunner Devlopment
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.
(more…)How my games have done in Syntax Bomb competitions – Part Four.
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.
(more…)How my games have done in Syntax Bomb competitions – Part Three
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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