“Updating Serious Sam 3: BFE. Ready to play in approximately: 59 minutes 31 seconds.”

Fantastic. An hour later:

“Steam was unable to sync your files with the Steam Cloud.”

Great. Maybe it won’t matter? I’ll start it anyway.

“Preparing to launch Serious Sam 3: BFE…”

Twenty minutes later:

“Preparing to launch Serious Sam 3: BFE…”

Right. Ok. No game for me tonight. Thanks Steam!

PC Gaming, eh? What laughs we have.

EDIT: So the RSS for this post is messed up too for some reason. This has been an evening of techno-frustration.

Thought I’d give a little progress report, just to reassure you all that I’m actually doing some work, and not just living the dizzying highlife that comes with having written a moderately successful freeware indie game a couple of years ago. I am living that highlife, I should add; it’s a whirlwind of caviar, champagne and society balls round our way, but I’ve also found the time to make some progress on Two.

I’m hard at work on level design at the moment: Here are a couple of screen captures! They’re both from the same area, very early in the game. This isn’t final art – I’m still fiddling with the look of the thing, but I think I’m getting pretty close now.

(click the images for full-size)

One last thing – would anyone be interested in me putting up some more in-depth posts about the nuts and bolts of game design? I find that stuff pretty hard to write, to be honest, but I’d quite like to give it a go, and I do have this nagging feeling that I should be making more use of this blog. I think I might give it a go.

I’ve gone and made a bit of a quick teaser trailer thing, showing a little bit of gameplay. It’s pretty much the most exciting thing ever released EVER.

So I suppose it’s time to actually explain what the game’s all about. Two is a puzzle platformer with a strong exploration aspect. It’s a game about being in two different places at the same time; you can switch between viewing each of the locations seperately, or crucially, both at the same time, superimposed on top of each other. By moving around in each world and carefully aligning the views, you can use objects in one world to get past obstacles in the other. And that’s basically it!

There’s a whole load of really interesting stuff I can do with that mechanic, but to ease people into the idea the video just shows the simplest puzzle I could think of. Two will start off pretty simple, but by the end it’ll hopefully be quite a brainteaser.

Hope you enjoy it!

IT IS A MYSTERY.

I also gave him a bunch of images from a few of the unfinished games scattered across my hard drives, and a piece of never-before-seen Small Worlds concept art, from the literally hundreds of thousands of pages of research and planning that went into that game. It’s like looking directly into my mind, only with less screaming and crying.

You can read the interview here.

Finally I can get back to gamedev – Two and Sentinel have been gathering dust for the last few months, and I’m excited about finishing them up and actually releasing something worthwhile for people to play, but I’m also really happy to have the time to actually play games again. I played Minecraft for the first time in about four months yesterday, I’ll briefly sum up my experience:

* What are all these extra status bars for? Food? That’s interesting.
* A village! Saves me having to make a house.
* Huh, food doesn’t seem to heal you any more. Oh right, health regenerates when you’ve filled up your food bar. Nice.
* Massive cave! Some sort of giant underground ravine, that’s new.
* Are those torches down there? And some sort of wooden structure?
* An abandoned mineshaft! Brilliant!
* I don’t remember spiders being blue.
* POISONED! OH NO
* Aha, a spider spawner. I SHALL DESTROY IT
* Oh right yeah I can’t instantly heal myself any more. ARGH SPIDERS STOP BITING ME
* DEAD

Next on my list are Bastion, the Stanley Parable, all those fanmade levels for VVVVVV, and I’ve ordered Xenoblade, which I’m very much looking forward to. Also, when I started my big animation project I abandoned poor Vin Diesel about to assault the Dark Athena for about the 19th time, I should probably go back and help him out. If I can stand the fact that all the dialogue seems to have been written by a very angry sexually frustrated 15 year old.

Anyway, gamedev: It’s all a bit overwhelming right now, and I’m not sure where I should start. Two is the shorter game, but Sentinel is further along. I just want to finish something as quickly as I can, maybe I should do a quick three-week game just to get back into the swing of things? or maybe I should work on the upgraded version of Rocket Storm? Choices!

It’s good to be back! Hooray!

In smaller game news: Fireflight has failed utterly at gathering a sponsor; I wondered for a while whether I should modify it to be more sponsor-friendly (read: discrete levels and an upgrade shop,) but having ignored it for a couple of months it seems pretty obvious that the right thing to do is to just release it as is, without a sponsor: Hopefully I’ll find the time to do that this week. No promises though! I am bad at those.

On the other hand, the animation side of things is going pretty awesomely well. Remember this thing we made at rathergood last year? It turns out we’re making a full half-hour Christmas special based on it, narrated by some amazing stroke of luck by Steve Coogan. Making a half-hour animation in four months doesn’t leave much time for gamedev though, which is why this blog has gone a bit quiet recently. But: we’re set to finish the film in mid september, so I’ll definitely have some exciting news in roughly two month’s time. Argh there I go again making promises.

Right: So, without making any more rash promises, here’s my gamedev schedule – Pretty soon you’ll be able to play Fireflight. Then in September, I’ll be able to give you proper news with regards to Sentinel, Two, and a proper multi-platform, upgraded release of Rocket Storm. Then, I will become Emperor of Space.

I promise!

Ahem.

It’s been gathering a good few downloads – more than I thought it would, and overall the store reviews have been pretty positive. A lot of users have identified a bug with the ‘next wave’ banner though – occasionally it hangs around for longer than it should, obscuring the first couple of missiles and making the game harder than it needs to be. I actually fixed this bug a few days ago, but there’s a delay between submitting an update and it getting approved and posted up on the store. I have no idea how the machine handles updating, I hope it’s reasonably well automated.

The reason I don’t know how updating works is because I don’t actually own a Playbook. They aren’t released over here until June, so I made the game using an emulator – I’ve never even seen the actual device, let alone tested my game on one. So I’m in the slightly weird position that thousands of people have played the game, but I still have absolutely no idea whether it’s running at the right frame rate, or the touch controls work ok, or even whether the sound is working! Haha, it’s a complete mystery.

Anyway, There’s now a link on the right sidebar over there to Rocket Storm, which I intend to release on as many systems as I can just as soon as I can. Starting with Flash! You may consider this an official COMING SOON.

Speaking of other systems, my Android experiments have been largely successful, with working Android versions of Small Worlds and Fireflight up and running on my phone right now. They’re both not quite perfect – Fireflight is the best fit, although it’s not yet running at its full framerate. Small Worlds is completable, but has some issues: it occasionally goes completely, insanely wrong (gets confused about which world the player is on, so picks random images from them all), and seems to suffer a noticeable slowdown about one minute into each level. Also touch-screen platformer controls are tricky; I have yet to find a control scheme that isn’t a horrible compromise. Next on the conquerable platform list is iOS. Then, the world! Probably.

Obligatory non-game news: I made a little stop-motion comedy sketch thing that you can watch right now over at BBC Online! Yay! It is the very best work of animation you will ever see. Also, this film here that I made last year with Rathergood has been nominated for a Webby Award in the Animation category! Hooray, it is also the very best work of animation you will ever see. We’re actually up against Aardman in the same category though, so there’s absolutely no chance we’ll win. The Aardman film is really really very good. It is the very best animation you’ll ever oh forget it.

Anyway that’s it for now BYE!

In my defense, the last three months have been incredibly busy for me – I’ve been working on a series of pretty awesome non-game related projects, which are in various stages of completion/production at the moment. The only one I can really show you yet is these idents we made for the vast and benevolent Crusha corporation, which are airing on Nickelodeon in the UK right now. I watched a bit of Nickelodeon the other day as a result, but I can’t recommend the particular show I saw unless you happen to be a teenage girl. There was a lot of sass. Several characters had conspicuous attitude. I watched through the gaps between my fingers.  Possibly I was not of the target demographic.

I’ve also done a stop-motion thingy for BBC online, which I think is going out in a week or so. I promise you it’s the best thing you will ever see apart from some other things. More on that when it’s available.

Also, I’ve been working on a super-secret project for rathergood, although all I can say about it is that I spent the last week constructing a badger.

So! Anyway, game news! Since we last spoke I’ve finished exactly two games! I shall tell you about them right now.

Game one is called ‘Fireflight,’ and it’s the super-secret game I hinted about in my last post.

(click the images to view full-size)

It’s a hand-painted 3D dodge-em-up very reminiscent of an old Spectrum game called Deathchase. I was going for fast and simple gameplay, in a Canabalt sort of a way. Anyway, I’m looking for sponsorship right now, so if you happen to be a major Flash game portal, I can promise you that if you sponsor it then it will definitely be a massive success and everyone in the world will be playing it all day every day for the rest of their lives. Also I accept money electronically, or in the form of sacks of gold bullion left anonymously outside my front door.

If you’re not a sponsor, then you can play the game just as soon as it’s released, which should be very soon now. You will be the first to know.  Yes, you personally.

The second game was a bit of fun – for a bit of a bet with myself, I made a game in three days for the new Blackberry Playbook. It’s called ‘Rocket Storm,’ and its a little arcadey reaction thing, where you have to defend a space-station against an endless onslaught of missiles and spaceships.

(Click the images to view full-size)

It came out surprisingly well, so I’m right now this morning having a go at porting it over to Android, with iOS next on the list. Oh, and I’ll do a Flash version too I reckon. I don’t think the Playbook is officially released until the 19th (although some people already seem to be downloading and playing it somehow. Journalists? RIM employees? Time travellers? I literally do not know.)

Anyway if you have a Playbook and you are in the future, you can download it (for free!) from http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/38933?lang=en

Or, you can use this handy magical QR code! IS TECHNOLOGY NOT MARVELLOUS?

Oh! I almost forgot, I did a little guest spot on the wonderful Van Hemlock podcast, in which I talk for a solid half hour about computer games without ever once reaching any sort of point or conclusion. Or remembering to mention the two games I’ve recently written, oops. I am not very good at this.

Listen to my incoherent ramblings over at Consoling Gamers.

Um… I think that’s it for now. I see on my other screen the Android SDK has finished installing, so I’d best get back to work.   Bye!

I suppose I should give some game development updates… Well…

	Two Not much progress here, to be honest. I’m waiting to finish Sentinel before jumping back properly into Two. The time spent away from it has given me the chance to really think about how it’s going to work though, so I’m pretty psyched about getting back to it.
	Sentinel Man, this one seems to expand to fill all available time. I keep thinking I’m nearly done, then a hundred new things pop up that I hadn’t considered before. It’s by far the biggest game I’ve ever made, but it’s getting there slowly.
	Secret Project 3 Haha, this one’s a little surprise, something I started working on just before Christmas for fun on a weekend. It’s a fun little game, and I reckon there’s only a couple of days worth of development left on it. Here’s a teeny sneak peek:

Oh, also, I’ve been credited recently with writing a game called Darkfate, about a scientist exploring a post-apocalyptic landscape. It’s a neat game, especially considering the constraints it was written under (it was for a competition that imposed a strict limit on the length of code,) but I have to admit that I didn’t write it – it was made by a chap called Kevin Soulas.

That’s it for now! Happy 6th of January!