The davecheesefish Games Blog

Source Now Available on GitHub!

Fri, 12 Feb 2016 10:15:12 -0800

Just a short blog post this time to tell you that you can now get the source code for Lag, DiscoBounce, and a few other projects over at my page on GitHub!

Poke through the inner workings of my games and discover the horror within!

Blitz's Closure and the Fallen City of Indie

Sun, 15 Sep 2013 11:30:53 -0700

Those of you following this blog are probably aware that davecheesefish Games is a project I do entirely in my spare time. My day job was working with 174 creative, talented and passionate people at Blitz Games Studios where I was one of the 10 working primarily on IndieCity, their open indie games distribution service.

This was sadly cut short last Thursday morning, with Blitz Games Studios entering voluntary liquidation.

At about 11am, an all-staff meeting was called on the second floor of our Leamington offices where we were delivered the bad news by Philip and Andrew Oliver, who were on the verge of breaking down upon reading the announcement. It was truly heartbreaking, and more than a couple of tears were shed while paperwork was distributed and desks were cleared.

The company was built with stability at its core but, as with everything, there's only so far you can push it before it falls over. It's not for lack of trying - the recent mobile games Kumo Lumo and Paper Titans, IndieCity, the Pi Store and various other unreleased projects sought to diversify Blitz's output but, along with the collapse of one of Blitz's major clients (THQ), ultimately couldn't support such a large company. The Oliver twins even poured personal savings in and friends of the company gave loans to keep it going for its final months in the hope it could be turned around, but sadly it was not to be.

My personal thanks go out to all the games studios who offered support and jobs for people affected by the closure. It has offered much-needed hope in an otherwise depressing situation.

Blitz may not have had a massive hit to its name, or been financially successful, but the biggest asset was its people. Pretty much every UK game developer I've spoken to has worked at or with Blitz at some point in their career. Many started there, myself included.

Everyone on every team made you feel welcome, wanted and cared for. When I fell ill with chest pain, the head of HR gave me her mobile number just in case I was worried of it happening again at home. Even while handing in tax forms to the finance department I was greeted with a smile. Less than a week before the closure we had Blitz's first (to-be-annual) company fun day at Heart Park. Even at the very end, there was still time for fun.

It still saddens me to know none of those people will be in the office on Monday. No more after-work disc golf sessions, no more Game Blitz Challenge, no more goat-based admin tools, and no more arguing over who's going to do the mid-morning bacon run. A new much smaller company will go on to service two of the ongoing projects, but IndieCity is not one of them. There's no news on what will happen, but right now it's sailing without a crew towards an uncertain future.

Thanks to everyone who's made my past 2-and-a-bit years awesome. Go forth and make the rest of the world awesome too.

davecheesefish Games: Reloaded

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 15:20:52 -0700

A new URL, new site, new design, new games and finally a new blog post! This officially marks the start of davecheesefish Games v3.0, with more updates, more games, more interaction and much less website breakage!

The new site is still settling down and some games haven't been uploaded to the new system yet, but they'll appear over the next few days. In the meantime, why not follow me on Twitter, like davecheesefish Games on Facebook, sign up for updates via email or add the blog to your favourite feed reader?

Finally, I went to the last EToo London live show on Thursday night. I'll post more details when they've finished editing the highlights, but it was a great evening and I'll definitely have to make an effort to get down there to see all the games in the daytime show next time (hoping there is a "next time")!

Guest Lecture

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 12:28:00 -0800

I'm going to be giving a guest lecture at the University of Wales, Newport this Friday afternoon, just before the Global Game Jam! Topics to be covered will include the basics of PHP and MySQL, getting XNA to play nicely with a web server, and building a basic global high-score system, with practical work setting up your own high-score server in one afternoon. Why not incorporate global high-scores into your GGJ entry this year?

If you're a Newport games student, come along and listen to my network-based ramblings! If you can't come along and if there's enough interest, I'll also put up an abridged version as a tutorial on davecheesefish Games sometime in the next couple of weeks.

Indie Kombat

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 18:18:00 -0800

For the last month, Alec Stamos of Ultimate-Nerds.com and I have been locked in an epic game-development battle for indie honour.

The contest ran from 5th-30th November.
Only 30 hours were allowed to be spent on anything going directly into the game.
Publicly licensed materials (graphics, sound, code libraries, etc.) were allowed, as long as they were declared in a readme file with the game.
No bleeding on the furniture.

The development stage is over, but now I need you! Voting has begun to find November's winner!

How do I Get the Games and Vote?

Go to the game announcement posts on IndieKombat.com to download both games: About Turn (my game) and, if you must, Ninja Art Game (Alec's game). If then you think my game's the best, vote for me in the poll on the right-hand side of the page! If you like Alec's game better, erm... there's no need to vote. Your votes really do count - as I write this, there are only 2 votes between us! The winner will be announced at the end of December.

I'll be continuing to work on my game, adding more levels and gameplay elements, and generally making it better. You can track the ongoing development now at Indie DB or Mod DB.

Vote now!

Eurogamer Expo 2010

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 15:06:00 -0700

Last weekend saw Eurogamer Expo 2010 at Earl's Court in London, part of the London Games Festival 2010. Despite being booked onto a non-existent bus, tube strikes, tube maintenance, roadworks and the bus company not stopping where they said they would, I actually managed to get there and back alive on the final day of the event, Sunday.

Overall I was impressed by the organisation and range of games on display but there was a sense that we were seeing the left-overs from the previous two days. Some of the booths in the careers fair were empty and there were very few staff from developers and publishers to be seen. I still had a good time but in future I'll make sure not to go on the last day. The hot dogs sucked.

Those who know me will probably also know that I'm not easily impressed by games and my opinions are usually against what everyone else thinks. Plus I'm very good at changing my mind. With that said, here are my thoughts on some of the games I played at Eurogamer Expo 2010...

Games

Gran Turismo 5

After having played GT3 A-Spec and GT4 on the PS2, it's an improvement. Not a big one, but an improvement nonetheless. The handling of the cars feels new and more realistic, doing what you'd actually expect them to instead of just sliding into the nearest tyre wall. Graphically, it looks amazing - the textures on the cars and circuits are much higher resolution and the models much more detailed than in previous installments, and the series is now heading firmly towards proper photo-realism.

The 3D - I'm not sure if it's my brain or the game, but I couldn't see much difference between the 3D and 2D versions of the game on show (except of course that if you didn't wear the glasses, the 3D version was all fuzzy). You could tell that the HUD was supposedly in front of everything else, but the actual track and car still looked pretty flat to me which was somewhat disappointing for my first experience with a 3D TV.

If you're a total racing fan, I'd say go for it. There's a vastly improved line-up in the garage (a notable addition being Ferrari) now housing over 1000 cars, and over 70 tracks including the 13-mile Nürburgring Nordschleife, my personal favourite from GT4. It's certainly not a bad game and if I already had a PS3 I'd probably buy GT5 without a though.

F1 2010

Definitely one for hardcore racing and F1 fans, not the occassional arcade boy-racer. The graphics are amazing, the gameplay is polished to a mirror shine and the tracks reproduced pretty much faultlessly. You can pick out every piece of gravel stuck in your tyres after your inevitable first-corner trip off-road. Barge someone out of the way deliberately and you'll get a black flag penalty. Brake while going around a corner and you'll just slide, as it should be (I'm looking at you, Gran Turismo 4).

Unfortunately, I'm not a devout F1 fan and I think that's the one problem. Some people will be driving the lives of their favourite racing drivers in their favourite racing teams; I'm driving one of a handful of very similar cars on one of 19 similar tracks, which personally I can see getting repetitive rather quickly.

Mafia II

Rule number one for presenting your game at an expo intended to make people want to buy it: Make the demo fun.

Mafia II instead had me walking across town to my mum's house, manually opening the front door, manually closing the front door, *cutscene*, opening another door, closing the other door, getting into bed, *cutscene*, waking up, going back through the door, talking to "mum" (in a *cutscene* on a console display stand with no speakers or subtitles), opening and closing the front door again, walking to a friend's house several blocks away... several doors and numerous cutscenes later (no hurry, nobody was queuing to play it), I had finally been allowed to drive a car, albeit fairly slowly and with terrible handling, but had yet to be given anything else to do and finally gave up to find something less mind-numbingly tedious to waste my brain cells on.

The worst thing (if you hadn't already noticed from the weird emphasis in the above paragraph)? Cutscenes! Too. Many. Cutscenes. Break. Flow. Like. Putting. Full. Stops. In. Between. Every. Word. In. A. Sentence. Except where I was wandering off the predetermined path looking for something to destroy in the name of anarchy, there was at least a cutscene every 20-30 seconds! If you've gone to the trouble of making an interactive game rather than a movie, stop taking control away whenever something interesting happens, leaving me simply walking as some kind of underpaid camera-courier in between.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

Criterion Games' last release was Burnout Paradise back in 2008, and they haven't deserted the crash-and-bash style racing in their new offering, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.

The Expo setup consisted of eight Xbox 360 stations linked together for consecutive multiplayer races throughout the day. The controls will be familiar to veteran Burnout players - left trigger to brake, right trigger for throttle, A for boost - but this time you also have the D-pad with various articles of weaponry at your disposal, including spike traps, jammers and road blocks. Of course, you can always resort to ramming your opponents if all else fails! The particular game mode we were playing was a rolling start, with the cops several metres behind the "racers". The player who finished the race in front won, meaning you weren't just up against the other team but against your own kind as well, which seemed to negate the need for two different teams in the first place.

This time round there are real licensed cars in the game, a change from the made-up brands starring in previous Criterion games. Models mentioned on their website include the Koenigsegg CCX, McLaren MP4-12C and Pagani Zonda Cinque for the racers, and the Ford Shelby GT500, Bugatti Veyron 16.4 and Lamborghini Reventón for the officers among us.

There was a lot of fun to be had, and though I've had bad experiences with the Need for Speed series in the past (and a complete lack of any real updates for Burnout Paradise on the PC), this will be one game I know I'll be buying some time soon.

Tech

PlayStation Move

I must admit, I was skeptical about the PS Move. Yes, it looks, feels and even smells like a blatant copy of the Wii with a glowing ball on the end. I didn't really want to like it... but I do. It's more responsive, more accurate, has much better graphics, and the rounded controller just feels better than the squared-off and chunky Wii one. They've done a better job of it, but they have taken nearly 4 extra years to do it.

The game I played was the table tennis from Sports Champions (not "Move Sports"?) and personally I couldn't fault it*. There were complaints from other people that perhaps it was too accurate and lacked the forgiveness of the Wii, but I'm not entirely sure that's the market they're going for. Unlike the Wii and Kinect's generally cute-and-cuddly and family-friendly graphic style we've seen so far, PS Move looks to have made no attempt to dilute (or dare I say it, "dumb down"?) what they've already got. Plus their advert (shown to the left) is slightly less nauseating than the Kinect one.

*Ok, one fault - the player on the left of the stand (using the pink controller) always seemed to win, though I'm not entirely sure if this was player error, game error or a specific controller failure.

Kinect for Xbox 360

On the flipside, actually owning an Xbox 360 myself, I was looking forward to finally getting to try Kinect out for myself before it hits the shelves in November.

There's no one thing wrong with it, just a few little things that eat away at the experience. Expo-side I played a brief 2-player game of Kinect Joyride (and felt a bit of a prat in front of all the people watching, but considering the fact my living room doesn't have a viewing gallery, I'll overlook that for now).

The first of the niggles? The time delay. While not immediately obvious in Joy Ride (though it does account for how hard it is to stay in control), the stand next door was playing table tennis from Kinect Sports and there was an obvious half-second delay between the player's movements and any action on-screen. Without playing it myself I can't say whether it affected gameplay or not, but it looked awkward. Back to Joy Ride, the motion detection was also a bit shaky - not once did I nor my opponent manage to activate any power-ups we'd collected, no matter how much we attempted to punch the people to the left and right of us like it showed on the screen. Again, I'm not sure if it was the game's fault, or the small crowd that had gathered behind us confusing the sensor.

On the stand to the left of us, they were playing the duck, dodge and jump-type minigame from Kinect Adventures, which actually looked quite challenging and possibly fun until one 7-year-old boy beat his big sister just by jumping up and down hyperactively all the way to the end of the track, bagging a massive time bonus and winning the game with no skill required other than a jumbo-size bag of blue Smarties and something fizzy.

All-in-all, Kinect seems to be confused easily and needs a lot of space but ultimately it will sell. Why? The kids were jumping around and having the time of their lives (and in some cases, so were the adults). It's still an amazing bit of kit and provided Microsoft continue to update it once it's released it has potential, but with the current delay, occassional glitches and sheer self-consciousness of waving around with nothing in your hands I'm not entirely sure it's a Wii-killer in it's current form.

End of the Day

I would've liked to have tried Medal of Honor, Rock Band 3 and Fable III at well but didn't fancy each of their fairly sizable queues. Either way, the Medal of Honor beta is now free on Steam, so I'll be playing that when I get a chance.

If you were at Eurogamer Expo 2010 or have played any of these games anywhere else, what did you think of them? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Graduation and IAP Award

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 13:47:00 -0700

Last week was a big one on the scale of my life so far! I officially graduated from the University of Wales, Newport with a 2:1 in BSc(Hons) Games Development & Artificial Intelligence last week at a ceremony on the university's Caerleon Campus.

That afternoon I also attended the Newport Business School PrizeGiving Ceremony, where there was an ample supply of very nice tea and cakes (mother was particularly impressed by the strawberry shortcake). As an additional bonus, I was also awarded the University's IAP Prize for the Best Game Development Project of the acedemic year, consisting of £100 and a framed sealed certificate from the IAP (Institution of Analysts and Programmers)! I've probably already said this far too much, but I'd like to say thank you again to Newport Business School, University of Wales, Newport and the IAP for their support.

Here's to the future!

Ludum Dare 18: PIXELSPACE Now Available

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:48:00 -0700

PIXELSPACE is finished and can be downloaded now for free at dcfgames.com/games/pixelspace!

You play as a white pixel defending yourself against incoming infected green pixels. You do this by shooting them down or by guiding them to crash into each other (the latter having the chance of an ammo drop, hence "enemies as weapons"). Coming into contact with enemies will cause damage, but you have the ability to regenerate health at a rate determined by your accuracy with your weapons.

For all my updates from throughout Ludum Dare 18, see my Twitter feed (#ld48 tag), the Ludum Dare entry page and the dcf Games blog LD18 tag. To see all the games from the event, click here.

PIXELSPACE Screenshot 1

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 07:21:00 -0700

The first screenshot of my Ludum Dare 18 entry. The player plays as the white pixel firing on the incoming infected green pixels. Ammo is limited, so the player must use the homing tendencies of the green pixels to cause them to crash into each other, producing an ammo crate containing 100 bullets and killing both involved.

Ludum Dare 18: The Story So Far

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 02:42:00 -0700

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you'll already know I'm taking part in the Ludum Dare 48-hour game development competition this weekend.

My game idea is a basic top-down shooter, with different enemies having different effects on the enviroment when they are shot. The player has a very limited ammo supply, so use of these effects is vital to survive. The player can also lure enemies into colliding with one another to kill them.

It's the start of sunny day 2 with 16 hours to go, so here's a sitrep...

Particle system is up and running
Player movement working
Enemy spawning working

Now I just need to add the ability to shoot, collision detection for the enemies and the various environmental hazards... I'd better get to work!

More news to come throughout the day.