New Year, New Stuff
I know it's almost the end of January but I've been busy doin' stuff 
New host
I moved the site when I was sent the end of year renewal by my old host one.com three months before it due to be paid. I'd have been fine with it if they sent it 30 maybe even 60 days before but 90 days before it was due? and I was told to pay up within 7 days. They also wanted to charge me for a domain renewal that I didn't buy through them. So much for getting a better service because I paid for it. I've moved over to 000webhost.com and will use their free hosting for a few months. Lets see if they can keep me happy, tall order I know but things seem to be ok at the moment.
New Project
After we put Halloween Defense up for sale on IndieCity we started work on Christmas Defense. Same shtick with a new engine that would support 1280x720 windowed or fullscreen, better character animations, bigger maps, blah, blah, blah... Only thing was IndieCity didn't open for public sales until just before Christmas, and to date we've made one sale on HD. So we scrapped CD, in favour of working on the next version of the Tower Defense engine and not making a seasonally themed game with it. I've spent the past few weeks working on the editor which compiles the XNA content files & packages the game or runs it for debugging. I'm almost ready to start working on the more TD specific parts of the editor, I just have the component layout editor and the in game scripting engine to finish and then I can start posting screen shots of the game.
New Work Projects
Don't worry I haven't quit my job, I'm just coming to the end of a project and once I get the UAT out of the way I get to start work on a Proxy Server Project. I love new projects especially when I've done a deal with the Project Manager that I don't have to do any of the documentation 
New Hovel
The wife and I are looking at moving to a new bungalow just outside Southampton, which is a massive step up from the poky hole we live in at the moment.
All in all 2012 has got off to a great start with all new stuffs, and the promise of more new stuffs
Bert Higgins : The Man From H.E.L.L.
I was approached a little wile ago by Richard Cobbett regarding the game I helped out on back in 1998. He wanted to cover Bert in he column Saturday Crapshoot on PC Gamer.com, he assures me that it's not just about lynching crap games.
All hail the finished game!
Well almost... The wife and I have been working together on a project for Halloween called "Halloween Defense".
Help save halloween from the pesky kids in this new tower defense game. From the grave yard of the mummy to the forest of the witch, the halloween monsters are here to help vanquish these horrible kids.
Podcast – Episode 001
I did a podcast with some friends from the IndieCity IRC about Indie Games development where we review a few new Indie Games, and what’s happening generally in the Indie Games industry.
Don't forget to send us your votes for the name of the podcast
- The Electric Game Show
- The Digital Pleasure
- Super Game Pod
Voting closes on Thursday 13th October at 1800 BST.
Send your answers to:- podcast@zerodependency.co.uk
My future in game development.
Sorry I missed last weeks post for Happy Dungeon, I have done Step 3 I just haven't written the post for it yet.
Having said that, I'm not sure about my future with XNA and I'm not the only one. Basically from what I've read because XNA is a wrapper over DiretX 9 Microsoft will not be allowing XNA to have access to the new Metro style interfaces. As a result XNA will only be available as a desktop application. Not a problem on the surface but this means that you can't sell you're XNA game in the new Windows market place. As far as I can tell Microsoft has no intention to move XNA over to DirectX 11.
If XNA has only a limited future on the next windows then I don't think it has a future with me. Now I'm trying to decide what I'm going to do next, as I see it I can move to Unity or give up on windows and make the jump to Linux. After all Visual Studio was the only application keeping me on Windows. I'm stopping all my projects until I decide.
If you have any ideas what Game development platform I should work on next leave a comment, or hit me up on twitter.
Happy Dungeon – Week 2
Continuing my XNA roguelike project into week two, I've had time to decide what I want to produce and how I'm going to do it.
Welcome to the Happy Dungeon
Like a lot of game programmers I suck at art, if you can stand the main character to be solid red, green or blue and for the all the bad guys to be variants on the remaining two colours I'll do the art for your game. I think this is one of the reasons why most game developers feel the need at some point to make a Roguelike, I am not an exception to this rule. So with that I bring you the new revised updated plan version two point oh.
Jonathan Blow talks to CSUA
I was working through the videos on indieconversation on youtube.com and got pointed at a talk given by Jonathan Blow to UC Berkeley’s Computer Science Undergraduate Association. I've embeded it here so I can find it again later and so you can benefit from it too.
Mort on-line
Recent Posts
- New Year, New Stuff
- Bert Higgins : The Man From H.E.L.L.
- All hail the finished game!
- Podcast – Episode 001
- My future in game development.
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