Wasting bandwidth since 1996

So, I’m writing a game for the first time in about a decade and a half. After scurrying around and looking at development platforms, I’ve settled on C++/SDL. Long-timers will remember that all my previous game development was done in C/Allegro, so there’s a wee bit of a learning curve for me.

The ultimate goal is to produce a giant, complicated jRPG but I’ve been out of the loop a lot, so I’m going to start with something simple. Enter Modular Bob.

MB will be a platform game at heart – a Metroidvania stylee thing. For those wondering what the hell I mean by Metroidvania, I mean an action-RPG-platform game involving a lot of backtracking as new abilities become available.

Modular Bob’s particular upgrade path is a little unusual. He’s modular. This means there’ll be many potential upgrades available but not all can be equipped at the same time, and each will have cons as well as pros. For example, Superspringyfeet have the advantage of providing Bob with the ability to jump to higher areas, but also increase his height and slow down his movement.

Currently, all of this exists only in my head. Coding so far has consisted of setting up a dev environment (CodeBlocks under Windows) and working out the SDL initialisation routines, but at least I have a black window to show for my efforts

Also – I’m planning building the thing reasonably resolution independent, so I should be able to get the bugger working on anything that is supported by SDL, including ‘droid devices.

Gah! I’ve just had a hankering to play Yak Attack and discovered that it runs *horribly* in Windows XP This is a Bad Thing(tm).

Sadly, the source to the game was lost when we had a housefire and the only way to get it working properly would be to write it again from scratch.

But then, I do have a very helpful ten year old who could give me a hand. And I could make it better. With extra stuff in it.

It’s really no contest! One remake of my own game coming up!

This is the Macintosh port of Andy Noble’s Lunar Jetman remake. It requires OS X. This game is completely free but please don’t cover mount it without permission.

Download Here.

Incidentally – I’m skint. Please consider making a donation of 5USD using the button below. You don’t have to, but it would help towards bandwidth costs and probably give you a little bit of positive karma.

This is a Macintosh port of Andy Noble’s magnificent remake of Jetset Willy. This game is completely free, but please don’t cover mount it without permission. Requires OS X.

Download Here.

Incidentally – I’m skint. Please consider making a donation of 5USD using the button below. You don’t have to, but it would help towards bandwidth costs and probably give you a little bit of positive karma.

Manic Miner has been around for a long time and has been available on platforms ranging from the original Sinclair Spectrum to o2 mobiles. Well, I’ve ported Andy Noble’s wonderful remake of Manic Miner to the Mac as well. You’ll need OS X to run this, but it’s ACEBEST. This game is completely free but please don’t cover mount it without permission.

Download Here.

Incidentally – I’m skint. Please consider making a donation of 5USD using the button below. You don’t have to, but it would help towards bandwidth costs and probably give you a little bit of positive karma.

From this section of the site, you can download the free video game remakes I’ve written. I haven’t done any new ones in quite a while, but all the old RetroSpec titles are here.

Sadly, the source code to these was lost in a house fire, so if you find any bugs – tough

I haven’t done a single bit of remake coding for ages – just got too many other things to do. This doesn’t mean that Dynamite Dan and Wizards Lair are off, by any means – they’re not. They’re just two of the many things I have bubbling away on the stove right now.

So where are they? Well, I have a few rooms of dynamite dan up and running, although I’m still plugging away at fully understanding the original level structure. Wizards Lair exists in concept only at this stage.

Hallo – just a quickie. My Macintosh ports of Andy Noble’s fab remakes are now available here. They should be up on the retrospec site as soon as I get a minute.

I’ve just come across the source code for Linux Lizards on an old ftp site For those not in the know (i.e. everyone), Lizards was the first game I ever wrote. The timestamp on the source code says November 10th 1995 – 11 days before my first child was born. The game was charming in an incredibly bad way and could very well be used as an example of how not to write games. It was written to run under SVGAlib on the Linux console and therefore had to be run as root, via sudo or by making the exe setuid root. Trouble is, it had an utterley stupid (on my part) exploit at the end – a system call to “clear” with no path, basically allowing anyone who could create a file named clear in the current dir to spawn a root shell. Oh dear. I’m older and wiser now

I’m going to port it to run under allegro cos I really REALLY want to see it again! It has knitted monsters!

Download

An unofficial sequel to Attack of the Mutant Camels, Yak Attack has more in common with Dropzone on the C64. Graham Goring was so incredibly shit at this game that I released a special “Pansy-foo-foo” edition for him. This version is toned down quite a bit (because it was originally really hard). I defy anyone to work out how to gubb the giant spiders Graphics were done by John Blythe.