Summerbatch is available now!

Volume 1 aers released and already it's stirring up a mass debate! People are annoyed with the delivery format (EXE installer download), there's a huge OT discussion about sexism in a Nancy thread, the off-putting low budget website and the cobwebs in their PayPal account - but so far there's been a lot of positive feedback about the games. We have to start somewhere :) Thanks to those who have bought Summerbatch and helped support the developers, Screen 7 and charity. People who have blogged about it (Spanos) and those who've posted it as news on great websites (Gnome, Jack and others). summerbatch.co.uk

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 :)

game a sutra

Just popping by with a little news :) 2011 is going to be a busy time for me in terms of soundtracks. With the possibility of one game going commercial under a well known adventure studio it's going to be a challenging time for me in terms of producing something really acceptable by today's standards.

Three other games are also on my schedule for some music so I'm happy to be busy with those game related projects. I've finally started hitting the AGS code again with new enthusiasm and have a couple of short game projects in the works as we speak, one being a crap maze game called Mr. Maze and also a point & click adventure mini-crap-series :p Anyway the main point is my motivation is in a good place right now.

And because of that I've also been out filming more for the Ben Jordan sequel lately, with some epic new scenes shot in central Oxford. Well, by epic I mean epic in terms of what we can legally film on the cuff in a few hours ;)

I've also left Facebook for a while as a social science experiment. I'll be testing whether my spam email decreases, whether my knowledge of what all my friends are up to is really necessary for my already over-flowing brain, how easy it is to continue to communicate with good friends & associates without FB, whether my concentration improves or gets worse without it, etc. I can still be contacted easily over email and mobile/texts.

So it's a different, new but exciting time for me in the gaming world. Outside of that things are mellow and typical. I've pissed people off. Still, this year could have quite an impact on my future, providing I play my cards right. Thanks for taking a look :)

Peace!

Wonga!

No free money here I'm afraid, but plenty of other interesting-ish stuff!!

I'm pleased to say several new games have been finished lately! Firstly there's the Tales of Monkey Island fan-game parody thingy which I created music for, pretty hastily, and never really finished! But it was on a tight deadline! By monkey_05_06 and artwork by Ben - nice to finally contribute to both their works!

Also, GreenBoy's new short comedy adventure Danny Dread is on Call which has a proper soundtrack by me! I love this little game, it's not too long but the puzzles are fun, the humour is witty and the animations are a very nice touch. Please check it oot :D

And also a demo of my very own game, Lost In Paradise which has effectively made the November - December 2009 my most productive AGS weeks ever! The game itself is progressing nicely. Lately I have been a bit slack on it though because of all these other mini-projects, so the original idea of having it done in 2009 is...very unlikely. But as the Complete-O-Meter on the s7 website says, it IS a good 50-60% complete :)

For Halloween, we also felt like making a little movie and so came up with a rather weird horror film called Bludgeoned To Death, available to watch for the 1st time in a higher quality....here!

And that's about it. I'm still skint, just got a comfy bed after using floors, couches and campervans for the last 18 months, so I am enjoying epic comfy sleep at the moment...Other than that, I still drink & smoke too much, but am quite content at the moment. Perhaps because I've been replaying Theme Hospital lately...Thanks for reading, now go do something more useful!1

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