Satan Sam.co.uk

2 of the enemies in Tormishire-

*click for full size image

As if by magic I’ve updated the Tormishire options screen/boot sequence to allow for 4:3 (standard), 16:10 and 16:9 (widescreen) aspect ratios. The only down side is widescreen ratios will lose vertical pixels, but the camera adjusts to compensate. You can also set the horizontal resolution to whatever you want, the vertical size is then calculated from the aspect ratio. Also supports full screen. Overall I’m very excited by this! Now everyone, no matter what monitor they have will be able to play the game looking at its best.

Another one! harhar I keep pumping these out. I need a shave. This guy isn’t even the hero of the game!

3 new screenshots. Also on the new Tormishire mini site. New GUI, menu etc. For some reason the images seem to blur a little in Safari (they’re 640*480 halved).

Sorry if this is too “bloggish”, but today was the first time I sat back from my computer and thought about how much this has all changed.

5 years ago, 2002. I was in school taking GCSE’s, I remember having a Sony MZ-R91 Minidisc player (still got that somewhere) and walking to Coyney’s house in the snow. Back when computers were little. 60gb was plenty, resolutions were at 1024*768, widescreen? Only for tube TV’s. I was making… Probably the foundations for Satan Sam; Bloomer. A few months later I would start work on Paintwar 2, then 3 in the summer.

Our PC was a 500mhz Pentium 3, it ran Max Payne quite well. CD-RW, CRT monitor, wired keyboard and mouse. 256mb RAM. We still have this computer, it’s pretty much my sisters and the only upgrade has been to a 1024*768 15″ TFT monitor (yea, it’s that old).

Fast forward to 2007 – I’m sat infront of a dual screened iMac with resolutions I could only dream of back then. It uses a dual core 64bit CPU and is as thin as the laptops of 2002. I’m watching and recording the best quality terrestrial TV available, I burn an episode of Life on Mars onto a DVD in about 10 minutes. I can grab the remote and jog through my photo albums, use my computer as a HiFi, seeing that I ripped every album in the house to the 300gb HDD. The keyboard and mouse are free of wires. The funny thing is this is the bottom model iMac, the lowest sized Dell widescreen monitor, it’s far from the best. We’re using lasers in mice and can download feature length films in minutes.

Wireless internet. My Pocket PC, iMac, PowerBook, DS, even phone are all connecting to a hub that shoots out internet in all directions.

I can pop into my brothers room and connect my 12″ PowerBook to his 32″ HDTV LCD TV with no fuss at all.

We’re also playing 3D games on handheld consoles that connect wirelessly to the internet.

Though the biggest one -

I’m running Windows XP natively on a Mac. Didn’t see that coming in 2002!

What on earth will 2012 bring?

As well as some little nuggets of info.

Click here for the site n that

It’s not much. But it will be a hub for everything when it actually gets made. And it is also Sam’s birthday!

It’s TNSS’s birthday on Saturday. To celebrate I’ve got a lovely surprise to upload.

So! until then…

I watched Roseanne series 4 over the space of 3 days, half way through series 5 now. It’s too great! Shame all these new American shows have to be glitzy and obvious. Between Roseanne, Home Improvement and Lost I have my US TV fix. Shame too that they all pale to Life on Mars which has just begun again. Fantastic series really, Kudos (along with Spooks) frankly make TV worth watching.

No really! I can count the shows I’m actively watching on one hand. 4 fingers go to BBC shows.

Other than that I’m looking after Muffy who’s suffering from some leg problem. Vet tells me to let her rest… rest! This dog sleeps most the day as it is! Still. She’s sat beside the fire snoring her little head off. Working like a mentalist on Tormishire (SHIRE, as in “The Shire”, not “to sheer a sheep”). I’ve almost finished the second wave of building the new engine. I’ve got the whole project envisioned now, sketched out the chapters and how it’s all going to run. Then it’s on to updating the visuals, then back to basics… world design!

Now I’m just waiting for my Wii to glow blue.

It’s a pain. I always change it so I never remember it. Kinda silly really. I had a spankingly good dream last night too. Since I’ve got nothing much important to add (Tormishires going well, etc) I’ll post what I wrote just after waking.

“I just had my greatest dream yet.

I was at school I think, but the point was I had just finished being somewhere and was about to travel home. I waited for the bus, but I was in a strange place so I just got the first one that appeared. Managed to find a seat next to some chatty girl. A while later the bus turned into a boat though! As it happens. All the passengers had fallen into the sea as it was getting a little rough. The ocean was littered with dead animals and even parts of planes. The boat was going with the wind and the tide so the route was winding all over the place. I looked around for a safe place to wait it out, I found the drivers cabin (as it were) up high on some kind of tower. I climbed up and waited behind a box, hoping it wouldn’t capsize. At this point I remember somehow finding out that the boat was ran by a Chinese company.
Eventually the boat ran aboard ground. I jumped off and ran home. I knew something strange was happening, like we were on the brink of a war or something. Everything was just so strange, even stranger were my parents.
They acted suspicious. Smiling constantly and hinting at a brighter tomorrow. I asked them what was happening, my suspicions grew that something was going to happen to me. I continued to ask them, even referring to my dad as “my old father”. He had grown a beard too, something he’s never had previously!
They wouldn’t tell me anything. I remember making idle threats, but can’t remember what they were exactly.
Eventually they took me to a building, a room, along with children from 14 to adults at 30 years old. Kev, an old lecturer from college was there. This would be the 3rd dream for him to appear in now (one was about him being able to travel into a strange dimension, the other was about a dragon ontop of a mountain).
He asked each of us to hold onto a key, incase we got lost.
The whole room then shut up and started to shake, it began to slowly descend.

We arrived at our unknown destination.

The building had a title, a company, the name was in Chinese, made up of 4 words with 3-4 letters in each word. The name then had some English attached to the end, then several numbers. The same company who owned the bus that turned into a boat?
I was in a strange place. Kev said it was a building outside of time, where they had been running experiments about energy. The first thing Kev handed me was a gun that created a dense spot of gravity, similar to the gravity gun but had the power to overwhelm the gravity of earth, thus making that location the new centre. We carried on, up some glass stairs, decorated with large black marble walls that could span for miles, lit by a perpetual twilight of a dark blue glow.
We continued to be guided around by Kev. Some of the young children had left, scared of what they were seeing. I told Kev “Why me?” to which he said “only a small group of people are let into here, you are not to tell of any of the secrets here”, which was mentioned so solemn and grave that I actually feared what would happen. My thoughts of coming out of this place and telling Caroline all about it were wiped out.
In this building levitation was taught, including a method to run it in the outside world. Around this point I lost my key so I searched along the marble floor and then found it, near some toilets (heh, absolutely minor point or what?).

This area is a bit fuzzy. So it sorta skips ahead a little.

I had become like Kev, I was now a guide too in this building/world for this eerie company. I had invited a group of people to enter the building. In my visit to the surface I gathered interest by flying around.
A war was indeed going on, my last memory before waking was flying around a giant tower block waiting for an enemy attack.”

A little silly, eccentric blah blah.

It was always something I wanted to dabble with - RPG elements. I was going to speed/jump upgrades in Sam but I got horrifically shouted at for it, and of course Titan Omega had a basic form of stats upgrading. There’s always Madventures where I made up some kooky formulas to upgrade the parts of the players that you used most. But that’s that.

Over the weekend Caroline offered some pretty snazzy ideas for Tormishire. One of them was an RPG like stats system. This will work so easily as the base was already there, they just needed to be upped! But they won’t be your typical “HP, MP” etc upgrades ooooh no. It makes it a little Metroidvania-ish, but I’m a huge fan of both games.

The gameplay is sussed now. It’s certainly not traditional, taking on more of an RTS approach. Nothing is finalised yet. Absolutely nothing! Which can both scare me and excite me though the potential. It’s extremely early days, after all.