Satan Sam.co.uk

Just playing around with a concept me and Caroline plotted yesterday. I rather like drawing these.

I’m in a mad crazy rush to get the game all polished up for early Jan and finally, after 2 years of using temporary graphics decided to work on the icon. Could write about the design and such with big fancy shmancy words picked up from design at uni but it’s 2:04am and my Christmas holidays are just starting and they’re hella needed… I just wrote Christmad. There’s a 256×256 OSXish logo too. Because I’m daft.

Years back there was an advert with Gloria Hunniford where she spoke about having both a good pair of shoes and a good bed, because if you’re not in one, blah blah. Everyone knows this. It is common advice I’ve lived by and applied to computer stuff. But mice.
My first proper mouse was one of the first Microsoft Intellieye ones, bought because I got sick of cleaning out the old mechanical mouse whilst working on a Zelda-like game in the late 90’s. But then I gots me own computer years later.

First up was a Logitech V500.

Worked great. It brought me through HL2, Doom 3. The touchpad scroll thingy was useful as hell and I could have lived with this for many more years. Spent £40 on this puppy. Cause of death- No idea, the USB receiver just stopped working.

Then, well Jimmy, you now have a desktop computer. Try a Razer! A Habu no less!

Built in collaboration with Microsoft you can’t really go wrong. Both have pedigrees with mice. Razer’s tech, Microsoft’s build quality (now now, they do make good controllers and mice). T’was very expensive at £60 but extremely comfortable but had a dodgy left mouse button (would occasionally double click on a single click). On-the-fly DPI adjusting was heaven sent, really useable feature for both work and play. Cause of death- it took many beatings to fix the faulty left button but eventually died because of internal rupture in the cable. Tried replacing with an identical cable but it never regained consciousness.

This morning I went out and unfazed by the last Razer bought a Diamondback 3G.

Nowhere near as comfy as the Habu since its more held with the fingers than with the palm flat. Great speed and weight, buttons aren’t as responsive when… uh… de-clicking as the Habu. Button placement isn’t as good either and the DPI adjusting is done via on-screen UI once a pre-selected button has been pressed. Doesn’t feel as raw as the Habu either. But there it is. £35 of your finest English pounds. Cause of death? Have to wait and see! Not even tried it in OSX yet, and it better like it. Great in Team Fortress 2 though.

What have we learnt from this? Don’t buy expensive mice. Ever. Now back to work, and the Diamondback needs taming for pixel art.

Been working flat out on this before the Xmas holidays kick off so heres some stuff-

• We’re at 195 rooms
• Currently adding 2 new environments (one of the criticisms was that I didn’t show enough environment variations in the trailers), one of them optional but well worth exploring- hidden in Chapter 2.
• The boundary dimensions are 70,000×35,000 pixels, with roughly 1/2 of it currently filled
• Boss 5 is proving tricky to design

On the technical front the Macbook is really helping production. I can work on the game, the graphics and music on the iMac with the Macbook running the beefy map file and such (OSX is brilliant at handling files like this).

Also working on a little art and design book for all this.

So yesterday I got a fancy new MacBook, didn’t plan it until the day before either. Not much else to say really, cept it’s faster than my current iMac so working on this will be a breeze. It’s a really beautiful machine and that trackpad… It’s perfect, just not under XP. Really impressed by the design of this thing. Going round the shops yesterday I saw similar spec machines but they were all much thicker and heavier, didn’t have a multitouch pad or LED display. Apple really made an awesome machine with this.

Also snagged a free printer off them.

And of course the lengthy process of transferring files from my old PowerBook.

It’s my first Windows capable laptop in about 5 years so I can go out and make Tormi anywhere I damn well please :3

We (yes, we!) are currently preparing some stuff. It won’t be a Tormishire demo but there’s a whole lot of new info and other non-Tormi things for download and display. Also got 1 mega nugget about a lovely little publisher that I’ll let you feast upon in time.