2023 marks my 40th year in the games business, making games pretty much continuously since 1983. Yes, I’m old. To mark this auspicious occasion, I’m hanging up my debugger and retiring from game dev (yeah, right). Obviously I’m still gonna mess around with the odd prototype here and there (told you so), but I don’t …
Read More “A Celebration, Some Closure, and Giving It All Away”
I’m an artist now! There I said it, so it’s true! Who woulda thought it? Having spent almost my entire adult life so far, as a software engineer, I decided I needed a change. Actually, it’s not quite that cut and dry, and in fact my current artistic distraction began as a tech project. Essentially, …
Google Docs is a pretty swish web app, but unfortunately its styling follows Google’s preference for flat, low contrast design. As a visually impaired user, this renders Google Docs inaccessible for me, unless I switch my browser (Firefox) to use the high contrast Windows color scheme, or use a “dark reader” type of add-on. Using …
Read More “Fixing Google Docs Broken Text Selection Highlight (High Contrast/Dark Themes)”
Been awhile, so thought I should post a quick update. Things have been a bit weird with the pandemic, but mostly things have just been ticking along. I’m fit and well, but my eyesight continues to get worse. It is what it is, and no point moping about it. It’s quite unlikely that I should …
Last year, around July time, I was given the incredible honor of “Doctor of The University”, from the University of Derby, for my years of service in the video game mines. Because I’m a bit of a dork, and hardly ever update this site, I never got around to posting about it. I stumbled on …
Blogs are old fashioned now. Someone told me they’re like vlogs only in black and white. Funny stuff that! Everyone who’s anyone is doing a vlog, and blogs are dead. The way people consume information in this modern era is very visual and stimulating, and I’m not sure people even read nowadays. Sadly, I’m not …
OK, my detour this past week into web site development has come to an end. Mission accomplished, and everyone is happy. And so I turn my attention back towards my little game project. Hooray! I was in the middle of coding various weapons, and so that is where I rejoin the fray. I have 3 …
I have a fairly tight, albeit self imposed schedule on this new game project, and so far I’ve been doing OK, keeping on track, checking stuff off my task list and making steady progress. And then 2 days ago, I got a call from a friend in distress; Her website, which I built for her …
After my lazy weekend working on the high score stuff, which I ultimately shit-canned trying to keep the game in scope, I got my head down to finish up the pick-ups and power-ups in the game. I’ve been working on in-game pick-ups the past couple of days. Pick-ups are bonus items like secondary weapons, power-ups, …
As part of this new game, I’m planning on having a global high score system where players from anywhere can post their initials and have them displayed across all game instances, and on the game website. Technically, doing that is pretty straight forward. You have some code running on a web server that receives and …
Read More “Building a High Score Web Service (Considerations)”