Alien Avian Attack! - Buy It!

Want some dazzling super fast twitch action? Want to play a game that will push your senses to the limit? Then play Alien Avian Attack, available now, on the Android Market!

A 'triple A' title if ever there was one...

Hot Damn - It Lives!

One of the many things that keeps me busy (too busy to write posts for this blog half as often as I should, in fact) is an entity called Chili Burn Adventures Corporation. 

This company brings together veterans from the video game industry and Weta (they've done the odd special effect or two for small art house films like The Lord Of The Rings trilogy and Avatar). 

Go on, have a gander at the website...

And now the CBAC website is live upon the information superhighway (wow, it feels retro using that phrase) for your delectation and delight!

For those who have been patiently following my posts the answer is: Yes, Alien Avian Attack is the official name of the project that I've been calling The Shooter With No Name.

Rocket Jump

At the moment it's cheaper than it has ever been to get a game to market. There was a time when it was just as cheap to make a game - one guy could thrash out a game in a few months on the good old Spectrum - but to get the thing in the mitts of the mighty public you had to get tapes or discs duplicated, and you had to send them out, plus all kinds of other cost and faff.

Nowadays the download infrastructures of the iPhone and Android platforms take a huge amount of risk out of the venture. Even if no one likes your latest masterverk, at least you're not sat on 500 copies of Horrace Sells Badly. Even better, you can patch it and hopefully save it from the indignity of forever residing in the long tail.

It's this effortless distribution that means so many of us can be independent developers at the moment. It's a great time to be making games, in fact, it might actually be the golden age of making games. I've certainly never had it so good.

I feel sorry for the larger studios, for they might be independent but they still have a lot of hoops to jump through when working with publishers. And these hoops often amount to about as much fun as emphysema for the developers shouldering the burden. There was a time when these talented folk had little choice but to continue with their impressions of Atlas (I think I might be overcooking this a little) and stay within the fold. 

But now the power lies with the person with the talent.

The latest of my former colleagues to enter the sea of independence is Antony Blackett (you may know him from such great games as Shatter and Flick Kick), with his newly incorporated company Rocket Jump.

I have no idea what he's planning to make. In fact, it would appear from his website that neither does he. But it will be awesome, I can assure you. 

Sorry, I've Been Busy

This blog (and all my others in fact) have been suffering a decided paucity of posts over the past few weeks. The reason is simple - it's crunch time at Tiger Towers. Yes, I've been slaving away over levels, although the results of all my effort is only just starting to make it into the Shooter With No Name, which scared the willies out of the rest of the team. Perhaps I would have been better off just wading in and thrashing out levels in the editor, but I wanted to plan and plot them a lot on paper first, which amounted to a fairly opaque design approach. I sincerely apologise to my cohorts for the potential cardiac trauma I have caused them.

Oh yeah, did I mention that the Shooter With No Name isn't really a shooter? Thought I'd tease you with that.