extra extra!

First update of the twenty-twelve, two months have passed and it's been quite a ride. Since the last post a fair amount has happened especially in the world of AGS.

I managed to complete my game 11-11-11 and release it and got some good feedback from players, even some good reviews including Adventure Gamers and it even made Best Free PC Games of the week with PC Gamer, so that made me proud!

Since then I've updated the game with more sounds and more cutscenes so it's even better than before, if you haven't played it, give it a go! It even takes about 2 hours to complete so I'm glad it panned out to be quite long. I personally can't finish it in less than 30 minutes and I know exactly what to do.

11-11-11 official page

Things are moving in terms of Screen 7 becomming more than just a hobbyist website with games and stuff, yep, it's finally time to take it to the next level, form a legal company and focus on selling great games. Of course, if that fails, it's time to officially stop pissing around with AGS and game-making and go get a real job :P

Here's how the new site is looking, which will be focussed entirely on games and services for game-makers. I'm wiping out the film section for the time being as it's no longer my focus for the company.



So if you have a game in production of any scale get in touch because I'm looking for games to sell. You can expect to see info on that in public on the AGS forum pretty soon.

That said plenty of people want to go it alone and I don't blame them. So it's going to be a very testing year for me and this business, fingers crossed, it will get somewhere :)

Beyond that I've been doing more editing for BJ:MD and it is in a very sweet state, but still not completely released. I've put the first 26 minutes online even though it's got some errors and is missing a few shots, for people to preview. But the weather has prevented me from filming the final scene but hope to tackle that this weekend.



Still waiting on Unga Needs Mumba a game I wrote music for last year. But it's undergoing some voice acting stuff, can you believe one of the chaps who wrote Ben There Dan That is providing the voice for Unga!

I've been working on test music for A Night at Camp Ravenwood, and that's been cool - I don't know how else to describe it. I'm having fun, and I'm happy with how it sounds.

Kinky Island is now looking for your help for funding, though the funds are half for KI and half for the setup of Screen 7 as a proper online publisher. You can help out at:

Kinky Island @ IndieGoGo

What else? Oh yes, organising a music gig, just a couple of weeks away now. Do you like rock and metal music? Feel free to come along, you can even get a discount ticket online! But if you're reading this, you probably don't live anywhere near Wallingford :P

Wallystock

You can probably see I'm in creative/do stuff over-drive. It feels like I am in a way but thats great, things feel achievable and it feels like there is a clear goal ahead of me for once, rather than uncertainty.

My friend Simon Love continues work on the soundtrack for Yahtzee's new game Poacher, it's very nearly done, just 3 tracks left to finalize. So as always Screen 7 is holding up Yahtzee's game :P Nothing new there, but I can assure you, it's very close.

I sent all the completed tracks to him last night and Simon has promised he will get the remainder done asap. He's been uber busy with 3rd year uni work. He also recently won and then set a new AGS tune contest and announced the winner the other day.

Fountain of Youth team are looking at ways of getting things done even quicker, we need artists - if you are one or know any, get the hell in touch, we need you to help us share the workload! Passage of Saints was released over Xmas and also went down well, thank you everyone who played it!!

There were a few errors and I don't want to be the ass that says they will never be fixed, but they probably won't until the end of the year, we all have so much else to be getting on with in the meantime.

Gonna leave it there before my computer crashes (which it WILL do in the next few minutes, regular as clockwork!!!) - but thanks for reading. It's pretty much just been an update this time round. Hopefully it's shown you that things are still full steam ahead this end.

Oh, and Summerbatch is still underway nicely - people seem to be working on their games and the list is looking nice!! More on that in a future update :)

BE GOOD!

let it snow?

I read today about a drought apparently sweeping the lower regions of the UK. We've certainly had very limited rainfall in my hometown this year. I keep an eye on the weather and have noticed no more than 7 days of rain since the beginning of the year.

We didn't have any thunderstorms either - unless there was one for the one week of this year that I've not been here... But the news article confirmed my curiosity - there has been a significant lack of rainy weather, and unless it picks up this is going to put strains on the water supply into early next year.

So where did all the rain go?

There have been some fairly freak weather incidents around the world this year. Off the top of my head I can recall the hurricane in New York, the recent floods in that city whose name I can't remember - and perhaps we can even include the Japanese tsunami (triggered by an earthquake). On top of that we also have El Hierro's volcano rumbling steadily at the end of the year, with claims it is forming a new Canary Island!

The Canary Islands and their volcanoes play a significant role in disaster predictions for the future. I enjoyed reading the one about a megatsunami that would apparently destroy the East American seaboard.

That said - there is no evidence as far as I'm concerned to say these things are "happening more often". I think myself and others are just reading about them more often, there are more reports on them and the Twitter age means we know about any fairly small event very quickly and from multiple sources.

So yeah, weather... Rain... We need some :) Obviously it's evaporated here and gone and been a freak event elsewhere in the world this year. Glad to know Oxfordshire could help on that one.

I am phasing in and out of creativity. My game is being tested. It's a phase I definitely missed out on with my last game (testicle) that I finished in April this year. There was no testing on that one but I can't remember if it was my incompetence or just no interest in beta-testing it.

During the testing stage - error hunting aside, I think it's just great to get some feedback prior to release to help you on your way. It's a key bit of game making motivation, and it can trigger new lines of conversation in your mind - ideas which you may have missed completely because you were never seeing your game from that angle before. Here's the trailer:



I want to make a short Xmas movie. But I am too busy getting AdventureX prepped and done, Passage of Saints and my own game above finished. And doing whatever I can on BJ:MD to finish it. I am pushing this old computer to its limits. So I'm posting this now before it crashes (which it does every 56 mins).

Thanks for reading, take care, and here's to some snow this year!

do not disturb

The last few days have been manic. The idea was to have 11-11-11 (new game by me) ready for the 11th Nov. Sadly that wasn't possible, despite a 30 hour stint (with a funeral in the middle) I still had some way to go. And now people are pissed off cos I'm not emailing them back because I'm too busy working on this!! But it will be ready by Monday or Tuesday at the latest, just a few more puzzles to make, and then of course the "final stages" of getting everything nice and trimmed - which ultimately takes ages in itself.

Dualnames has been hard at work on Passage of Saints (our Indy xmas game) and along with miez has made some excellent progress. Everything is looking good there for a December release. AdventureX is still umm arr as not many people have bought tickets.

That's about it. I have work to do. Don't forget to visit the AGS blog (ags-ssh.blogspot.com) to read the old ezines I used to make with Yahtzee and other AGS folks. For me at least, it's fun to step back into history and see what was going on back then :)

Thanks for reading! Now go away. I don't need disturbing :P

un-convention-al

Well AdventureX is gearing up to be pretty cool now - lots of AGS folks have kindly said I can show their games at it, many of them have never been seen/played which is very exciting! Also glad that C. Bateman and A. Beckett are still happy to give a little talk about making games :)

Also securing a bit of a deal with Lace Mamba Global who will hopefully supply a few demonstration copies of games and prizes so that people can take away some of their latest published titles. No word from TellTale Games yet though.

And, a few tickets have sold. I've also noticed a few other people kind of pre-empting their attendance to the event, so to those people I say - get a ticket! I will make a decision around the 1st Dec whether it will officially go ahead or not. If I can't cover the venue hire, or only five people have bought a ticket - it just won't be worth it. But if it does happen, it will most definitely be worth it!

I found a cheaper hotel - Ibis Hotel in Reading, 2 mins from the station. So anyone coming and staying I would recommend that place, its 40 quid for 1 or 2 nights. You would however need to get a train to Didcot from Reading, but that's literally five pound single or ten pound return. And the offer is still open to my closer AGS friends to stay on a sofa at my flat...lol!

So exciting stuff... My game 11-11-11 is nowhere near being complete, for its deadline this Friday. But I will have it ready...fingers crossed. Actually I can't not have it ready, otherwise there's no point :P Work behind the scenes at FoY has picked up as Spanos comes on board to help code the Xmas mini-game. Poor Jan had a biking accident and is unable to code for a few weeks. We wish him a quick recovery. Miez continuing all the lovely background art for the full-game.

Oh and I am very soon going to get this device that will let me get Lost In Paradise off the HD I cannot put inside this computer. Yay!

I worked in a Chinese takeaway this weekend, and it was fun. Basically just grabbing the food orders and packaging them, with some nice people to work with. Also some funny co-incidental names that mean nothing to anyone else but me on the orders like "Bateman" (AdventureX) and "Sinclair" (BJ:MD) made me chuckle. Simple things!! It also meant I could eat pretty well and cheaply over the weekend which is great. This is not a permanent job though (maybe in the future?) so money is still very tight.

Sadly my grandpa died last week so I have a funeral to attend later this week, which will be sad. But I'm glad I had a nice dinner with him just a week before his death, and he certainly had a good life (and a long one). RIP Harry Carr

Other than that, not a lot. It's Sunday morning, I haven't been to bed yet - today I'm just going to slob out, do a bit of programming and watch a bit of TV. After a spliff and a sleep that is.

Ciao for now! :)

X marks teh spot

A small update. My main computer blew up last week which has left me on my reserve old IDE machine. Thank hellfully I backed up just about everything. So the BJ movie is safe, Lost in Paradise is safe as is my latest soundtrack. However it is more than likely going to cause a few problems in terms of editing the BJ movie, as the PC I'm on now struggles to run Notepad. Add to that a few busy weekends - so I would say a delay on the movie is inevitable. Which will surely annoy some people as I have been aiming for Halloween.

That said, and it was probably the fun of Mittens that made me do it, I've returned to trying to organise AdventureX, which is a kind of show and tell on a public scale for amateur adventure game developers and fans. I'll have the website online very soon. And I'm excited that a chap who designed Discworld Noir is coming to the event!!

I've just read a Czech review of my game Night of the Testicle - it made me chuckle! They gave it 60% which is very pleasing for such a time-waste of a game. The player rating of 18% is probably more accurate ;) But that along with other comments here and there have inspired me to get on with the final (body) part - Back to the Bollocks!!1

Misja has been posting updates to backgrounds he's working on in facebook for Fountain of Youth and the team are making sure our Xmas game Passage of Saints is ready in time for Christmas. Also - my team of Kinky Islanders are working hard on some amazing work. The assets are building, it's going to be a very sweet looking game.

I've recently finished a preliminary version soundtrack for Unga Needs Mumba which is a new AGS game in the works by Koodn. It appears he's had it in the works for quite some time now, it's a superb little adventure and I'm really pleased I was able to write some music for it. As I write this paragraph I've just had a PM from the man himself saying he's finished implementing the music, so I should have a preview tonight or tomorrow - woot! Work continues on my Living Nightmare: Freedom soundtrack. And as mentioned earlier Passage of Saints for which I wrote music for a year ago will hopefully be out this Xmas with that old but still unheard soundtrack. Once the game is out I'll also put up my ex-Primordia soundtrack here, but will wait til it's out as my soundtrack's track names may give away the story/puzzles.

So in the gaming world things are going nicely. Lost In Paradise the second version has been coming along well - I'm really pleased and actually quite happy it's gone a second time, it's given me a chance to re-work certain puzzles, knock out a few crappy camera angles and enhance animations and characters a bit more. Also been proof-reading a game called The Visitor which is a cool tale of an alien and I highly suggest checking it out when it comes out over at AGS in the next couple of weeks!

Got a couple of job applications on the go (online ones, that take ages to write) so I'm hoping I may have a career of some sort in the near future (and moneys!).. Other than that there's not much else to tell. I used Tesco online delivery for the first time, it's pretty damn cool :D Online grocery shopping can certainly be added to my list of random chores I like doing online.

That's all. Thanks for reading :)

Updates

Just a quick one to say Chance of the Dead was well received which is great news! I'll put up the music on s7 very soon. Also Kinky Island production continues and the guys are creating retro wonders! Mittens is just around the corner so I've been working on Ben Jordan Must Die to give the folks a preview before its release around Halloween.

I recently added "A Christopher Jones Adventure" to the AGS DB which was a test game from many years ago - the first time I tinkered with including speech. It's barely worth the download but if you use AGS and you want a quick chuckle..

I also found out last night of someone that contributed some stuff to s7 website - drinks at the pub! He submitted some flash games a few years ago and I always assumed he was just some random guy from Lithuania or something...haha :D

That's all for now..

no-more-dia

sadly my involvement with Primordia has been terminated. A publishing deal with WEG has proven my music to be non commercially viable. So i am sad now. Its production has helped me through some tough times. a great game - the team did everything they could to keep me on board but in order to get the deal dave has requested a new composer. I owe it to victor cos he's really been a dude. but anyway yeah shit :'(