Solo RPG's and an Oracle System
2025-10-09
I recently started experimenting with playing some Solo RPG (Journaling) games. ... More
TACMAN - Tactile PACMAN
2025-09-08
I decided for my next maker project to try to recreate my TACMAN game as a physical game ... More
On the imperfection of communication
2025-03-22
I recently watching this short YouTube video experiment and it made me reflect on the challenges of communication in large organisations! ... More
Nashes to Ashes - Postmortem
2016-10-22
When the themes came out I took the opportunity to watch the "Dr Strangelove" movie. I knew about it but had never seen it. I thoroughly enjoyed it and really wanted to try to incorporate that tightly into my game. This turned out to be double edged. Some ideas came easily from that theme but it also felt a bit constraining as well. ... More
The Gödel Sentence - Post Mortem
2015-08-31
“The Gödel Sentence” is a true but unprovable statement. It comes from Gödel’s incompleteness theorem that says that in any closed system there are things that are true but you can never prove them. The Gödel sentence is such a truth. My game was about making decisions with incomplete data. There are truths about the world and the people that you cannot prove and yet you still need to make a decision; you have to decide who gets water, you have to decide who lives and who dies. ... More
New Page on Newsgrounds
2015-03-21
I created an account on Newsgrounds to try out that site for getting feedback on my Unity games. The site is quite nice overall and has the ability for you to upload a Unity game directly so people can play it without downloading. There is a nice "under review" period for each game which induces people to rate the game and give feedback, so I think this will result in getting some fairly quick feedback. I've uploaded Chuckie Egg as a first attempt and it made it through the "under review" period OK. I'll see how that goes for a few days and then consider uploading a few more of the Unity examples. This wont work for the Python games so I still intend to release those on Pygame. ... More
Serge 0.5.1 documentation live
2014-03-02
I have finally updated the serge online documentation to version 0.5.1. It was quite out of date and was missing the documentation of some of the more recent blocks. ... More
The laboratory is open
2013-04-21
I created a new area on the site, call. I'm going to use this area to share experiments, projects that aren't completed or projects that have been abandoned. ... More
Mechanics follow from goals
2012-06-19
There were a couple of technical challenges I had to overcome in my new game SubTerrex, the first was to create a realistic rope simulation and the second was to be able to include dynamic lighting effects. Interestingly, both the lighting based mechanic and the rope-based exploration evolved from my goals in the game rather than being an intrinsic goal that I had at the outset. ... More
Tuning Mechanics
2012-02-18
From a very early stage I had included an overheating mechanic in QANAT. My thinking was that I wanted to dissuade the player from just continuously firing a wall a bullets up at the aliens. As you fired the gun it heated up and if you allowed it to reach a critical temperature then it would shut down for a few seconds. ... More
Crashing and Burning
2012-02-14
Over the weekend I sat down to add some new features to [[QANAT]]. I started trying to create some new alien types and was struggling to come up with some interesting behaviour. While working on this I got to thinking about what the core mechanic of the game is. It struck me that the core of QANAT is the realism of the alien movement. ... More
Visualizing thinking using water logic
2012-12-31
Water Logic is a technique developed by to help visualize the way you are thinking about a particular problem or issue. Over the years I have found this to be a powerful approach to help organise my thoughts when facing complex problems. In this article I will try to explain a little bit about how the technique is used and show some examples. I created a web application to help in drawing water logic diagrams, which are the key to the approach. ... More