Six weeks in game dev!

This is meant to be weekly! But isn’t. But rejoice, for I am here, reporting in with all the info :)

What’s happening?

Basically, I’m in a kind of crunch on UrbX Warriors, the Spectrum Next game I’m creating with Stoo Cambridge. It’s kind of a crunch in so much as I’m working and concentrating extremely hard on this project, to the detriment of anything else. Hopefully there’ll be no need for it to turn into proper ‘games industry’ crunch as there is no publicly traded publisher screaming about getting the game out before their Q4 results are due. BTDTGTTS!

What’s more, I’m quite enjoying the whole thing. Writing a Z80 super-Spectrum game is not, in any sense of the word, ‘easy’ but it’s possible make steady and pleasing progress which feeds back into more forward progress, and repeat. Also, I think what we’re doing is pretty cool. It’s a pleasure to split the project 50/50 with Stoo and see each others ideas come to life on a daily basis. This is what game dev is meant to be!

I did, however, lose two weeks to a task I’d not expected. I might have mentioned this before, but the Next has this limitation of 128 ‘sprite patterns’ - in other words, animation frames. 128 sounds a lot, but actually isn’t at all, and we were starting to break the game and were thinking about ways to limit each level in terms of what game objects might appear on it. This would be bad. Very bad. Once again, the genius that is Mike Dailly, told me that the solution was to write a clever sprite caching system that would dynamically age-out unused frames to make way for newer ones as required via a fancy ‘linked-list’ system. He in-fact has a schematic of how such a system might work on his Patreon page. I decided I had no choice but to go this way, but my goodness, it was pretty difficult. Conceptually, for me, it was quite challenging, but then implementing it in assembly made it doubly so. Not just hard to write, but hard to test, too. There’s a disconnect between the code and the results on screen, as things slowly go awry and there’s no obvious way to know why. But now we have it and it does fix the problem - and much satisfaction is gained.

Anyway, the plan with this project is to Kickstart it, like, really soon. Two or three weeks from now, soon. Check out the landing page - HERE! We have some fun ideas for the campaign video and you know I have form for that sort of thing.

I’m also pleased to report that the Broken Sword Templar Keyring fundraiser has done really well. So far $4000+ has gone to the guys building drones in Ukraine, and we’ve funded 13 of them so far. I still have a few keyrings left, so please consider it > Keyring Fundraiser

Even stranger, a while back I wanted to create some perspex display cases for the original Broken Sword big box games. The way to do this was with help from Byron at the 8-bit Anarchy Games Shop over in Australia. The only problem being that I had to order 50 of them from the factory. It was not an entirely sensible thing to do. But they are extremely nice things, so take a look HERE if you’d like one or more for yourself. I’ll even sign them ;)

Okay, I promise to write another of these next week :)

Be vigilant.