So, last weekend I took another trip down to Nottingham and the very excellent Nottingham Video Games Expo. This was a cool retro event with a real buzz about it. I had some good chats with numerous friendly devs before having an on-stage interview with my good friend Ravi Abbott (who also organises the Amiga Kickstart show - also in Nottingham).
My theory that the retro and indie scenes are growing into the mainstream appears to be holding firm. Given the on-going turmoil over in the so-called AAA side of the ‘business’ this can surely be no bad thing. I felt very happy to be a part of it.
Weekend jollies aside, work progresses well on UrbX Warriors - which I got to plug on-stage in Notts of course. I even have a tee shirt sporting the freshly minted game logo (courtesy of art maestro, Stoo)!
The game itself now has a decent looking UI, with a simple inventory and I have just this minute finished coding the Z80 logic for our zombie enemy. This guy was a lot easier to code than the ghost that preceded him because the code base is starting to fragment into lots of small reusable components which then get, er, reused. The ghost was initially one long chunk of code, which is fair enough when you need a coding win. But the trick is to come back to it (once it works) and give it a sharp prod to see how it might break down into smaller chunks. Sure, it’ll be broken again for a while, but after that you get something more useful.
The next task will be to put in a bunch of collectable objects for the inventory - food, potions, keys, weapons, and whatnot. Then I’ll make them do things - like open doors and chests, etc. I think we’ll have an actual playable game pretty soon. There is some useful pressure driving all of this as Stoo and I will be at Zzap! Live soon (17/18 August) and we plan to show the Speccy version of UrbX for people to actually play. Zzap! Live is another terrific event and I urge you to go if you can - I believe tickets are selling out fast, though! We might even have some exclusive flyers to hand out. They’ll be worth millions one day…
While I am, of course, fairly busy, what better time than to think about launching another newsletter?! I’ve been mulling the idea of a magazine (to be called Gameworlds Weekly) that simply previews games in development (indie, low budget, of course). Each developer will answer the same questions about their project, and would be encouraged to report back however often they want to report on progress. If it took off, it would perhaps help, in some small part, with the problem we all have which is that of discoverability. A frequent appearance in the mag would also act as an incentive to make progress. The newsletter will always be free to read, and will instead take ads/sponsorship down the line. There’s nothing there yet, but feel free to sign up Here. The plan is to soft launch a pilot issue in the next week or two.
Right, I’ve coding and another newsletter to sort - and next week I’m off to Belgium to meet up with Ukrainian developer friends who’ve recently escaped from Putin’s barbaric terrorism. Beers will be drank :)
Tony Warriner
Spotted at NottsVGE, a PS2 devkit. Not seen one of these in a while!
Finally, any guesses as to what this is?