distractionware: devlog

I’ve been quiet lately, but only because I’ve had my head down working on this new thing! Ruari and I have now been working on this robot programming game for a little over two months – we had a round of testing a few weeks back that prompted a bunch of new ideas, and once we’ve worked through them we’re going to have another round.

I’m pretty excited! The game’s already feeling really solid, but we still have loads of new ideas we wanna try. Looks like this is gonna be a big one!

Little thing I made over the weekend for a game jam:

Still working on this! Recently, it became a collaboration – Ruari O’Sullivan has been working with me to help turn this game from a hacky mess of ideas into something solid and playable.

The two of us are aiming to do a small alpha sometime in the next week. (If you’re interested in checking it out early and giving us some feedback, let me know!)

Happy new year!

Here’s a little thing I started for Ludum Dare which turned into a bigger thing and… well, you’ve heard this before. It’s a survival game about programming robots to help you colonise a planet. (Er, maybe I need to start thinking smaller for Ludum Dare.)

Was hoping to get it finished this side of 2015, but that’s not going happen. Ah well – it’s looking like it should be ready early next year!

This has been a weird year for finishing games for me – I’ve mostly spent it working on tools, a lot of them still unreleased. My weird distractable process usually works out – Super Hexagon and VVVVVV were both break games from bigger projects – but recently, it hasn’t gone so well.

Anyway, I’m still working on this thing I started for Ludum Dare. Thanks to Ruari O’Sullivan, I’ve got the elaborate tech side of what I want to do working. Should be done before the new year.

So I guess I’m making something for Ludum Dare! Probably the Jam rather than the Compo at this point.

My plan is to make essentially a survival game with a twist. Haven’t gotten to the twist yet. Hope it works out!

This is very long overdue: Super Hexagon has been updated on iPhone! If you update today, you should notice a pretty dramatic performance increase, and, at long last, nice smooth retina graphics!

While the original flash version of the game ran great at launch, it hadn’t really kept up with newer phones and new versions of iOS. This update is a port of the openFrameworks version of the game (which is on desktop and android already). With this port, the game should run fast and buttery smooth on everything right up to the brand new iPad Pros! It feels really, really nice to have the game running at it’s best again on the platform where it first came out.

This wouldn’t have been possible without the tireless work of Daniel Rosser, who worked with me on this update. His incredible attention to detail is the reason the game runs as well as it runs now!

Thank you so much for playing Super Hexagon. Hope you enjoy the update! <3

Thank you very much for the all the naming suggestions for my library! In the end, I went with Haxegon, which was suggested by a number of people (including Tom and nuuup). Cheers!

Zeedonk isn’t that project. Zeedonk is something else. Coming soon!

Hello internet! I need some suggestions!

Recently, I’ve been working on a big programming tutorial – it’s for helping total beginners get started with game programming. I call it Learn to program badly with Terry, because names are very hard.

As part of that project, I’ve also been working on a beginner’s game library. Right now, that’s called TerryLib. Because, again, names are very hard.

The thing is, it’s starting to look like this library could actually be pretty useful – a thing that might be good for more than just learning to program. A thing that others might like to use. So, it’s a bit limiting to call it TerryLib, right?

But names are very hard. What should I call it?