Satan Sam.co.uk

Talent seems to run right through MrPineapple and his family. Poppy, Pineapple’s sister, crocheted these 3 little characters from my older games.

How awesome are these?

Stick is DONE! It’s rather spiffy in real life, away from cameras. Had I taken a bit longer to plan it I would have done something much more different. The UK market for fight stick parts is pretty poor, we have www.gremlinsolutions.co.uk and an eBay seller, but they only stock the most common components. But I guess that makes my British-modded Chinese-manufactured with Japanese-parts controller that little bit more awesome.

The new blue ball top and shaft. This thing catches light so well.

Steep angle shot of the buttons. The blue ones are by far the best. I’d love to make a black+blue stick at some point.

Better shot of the front. Can I stress again how lovely those blue buttons are? I can? Good.

Infront of my 27” iMac (to give a sense of the size of the stick). Pinball buttons for all to see.

The pinball buttons were the hardest part of all this.

An electric drill was used to make several pilot holes that would eventually be cut through, making a rather ugly looking hole. Then, and this is quite silly I think, a soldering gun was used to melt through and create the shape. This left loads of residue which, and sillier still, was removed with a Dremmel recently discovered in a cupboard!

Another hard part was cutting out the artwork.

It wasn’t technically difficult, it just took a while. Used a guillotine whenever I could and a scalpel for the rest. It does work too. The button lips cover up any flaws from the cutting process.

And because I like you so much you can also see my new carpet.

And speaking of awesome things being made, MrPineapple’s supercool sister is crocheting some characters ‘o mine. I’ll post my own photos when I get them!

I really like making these installers. My problem with traditional ones are they add files to places you don’t want files to go and registry stuffs, that’s why I’d rather use these from now on. I’m generally against anything that takes the user longer to get into the game but it’s a lot easier to build these than dealing with emails full of people saying they can’t save games, music won’t play and all that!

Also me and teh girlfriend just got our copies of Heart Gold/Soul Silver. She’s an oldskool pokemon buff so there’s nostalgia running through her DS, and for me it’s a whole new game! Just no new pokemons is all. The pokewalker! Oh my, I do like my walking and now I know how much! In the first 2 days I amassed 28,000 steps! We were blasted by rain storms a few times but hey ho.

OH HAI WORK! I’ve also just finished up work on the scripting engine for the next game which is half the battle. Also looking into making an iPad version too (possible iPod but there could be resolution issues… the PC version will be 720p after haul). 3/5 levels have been drawn out.

How’s this for mental blockings…

One of my most played games on the Amiga was Pinball Fantasies and Dreams. My aunt used to have some mini pinball game. Every time I went on holiday I played pinball games at the arcades (we don’t have them in our town, boo) and I put a fortune into them, and Mortal Kombat 2. Then along came Windows 98 or something with that Space Cadet pinball game and I played that a lot too. Basically man, I played a lot of pinball.

Then, somehow, I forgot that!

I recently got the port of Pinball Fantasies for the PSP and it all came flooding back. I love this stuff! So I snatched a copy of the Williams Pinball collection for PSP and really fell into it all again.

I think I like it because it has an illusion of being random whilst actually having a lot of skill behind it. To do well you need to master the board and how to activate the extra ball, multiball, multipliers etc, but more so you need to know how to aim the ball and think ahead of its current path. I can’t watch horror films without looking past the image and imagining the studio, and games have never really physically affected me – except this. Which makes a nice change!

So I got thinking… After the current projects and then Tormi why not make a pinball game? Well because they don’t do too well in the market. But if I could come up with something to really make an interesting game, something that gets the feeling I have during pinball into the minds of others… it could possibly be done. Maybe as an iPhone game? With Sam, Tormi, Titan Omega, MrPineapple tables. Now Unity Indie is free it might be worth looking into.

And this is a screenshot of New New enwenwnewne Sam’s Spectrum mode. Well not really, its just me messing around with HWA shaders. It’s even more impossible to tell whats going on in with that effect! So all the other projects are coming along really well. Hadal is almost finished. The (new) map is just around the half way point but progress is going fast now. It just needs testing and adding the online highscore submission thing. The Sam remake is coming along very well, it’s just a matter of tweaking really. All the old codings have been transferred and edited (Sam now has ceiling value in both horizontal and vertical movement to make it more manageable, like what Pantene Pro V does for hair), adding and altering the powers too. The basic beam attack now has a power up with splash damage.

Just spent a day or so updating the Sam engine. 60fps and hardware accelerated. So far just using Pixel Shader 2.0, but I’ll put an option for 3.0 effects for those with supported video cards. The system requirements for this are lower than Tormishire’s! Turning that whole inefficient New Sam engine thing on its head here.

I’ll be removing a lot of stuff though. It’s a back to basics refinement thing this. Acrobatic arena combat, engage!

I’ve not forgotten about yawl. I’m doing mad scrambling dashes to get the game done and dusted. Both me and Pineapple did a spot of testing last night and found a plethora of bugs, but they’re easily fixed. I’m also working on a website for our studio, it’s all very spiffy and modern (putting that degree to good use!). Just another day or so now! (but didn’t I say that last week?)

And this! This could be important depending on whether or not you liked Sam. That above shot was taken from New Sam running in a new MMF2 build with HWA. Visually it’s no different from the original of course (Sam was invisible when I took this pic), but it’s the performance and bug fixing that I can now do. So a proper 2009 update of Sam will be developed shortly.s

Well since nobody bothered with my recent Tormi weather video I’m going back to talking about cereal and clouds and emotions.

Went to my girlfriends end of university gallery last week and saw an almost familiar face! Fantastic artwork though and unfortunately didn’t get to meet the artist and no business cards either so I couldn’t even commission a Sam 2 concept art picture. Whaaaat?!

In 2001 I used to walk my dog up around a village called Grotton, which is surrounded by fields and hills and Elves. There was a tree (the top right in that last photo) upon a hill that I always wanted to just chillax under, back then I wanted to take up Advance Wars on the original GBA. Since then I finished school, started and finished college and university and handhelds have been and gone. I wanted to go up there with Advance Wars Dual Strike on the DS Lite and a PSP with a few games. The plan being to entertain my long held fantasy. Except the path to it is overgrown to the point it is impassable. So no handheld hilltop shenanigans for me. But there was a helicopter at least.

And I’ve been helping in demolishing the main bathroom. Taken off the tiles, added a new radiator and bought the new sink, toilet, cupboard etc. Next up is the shower. It’s a mighty shower. A steam room/shower combo with iPod connectivity and FM radio, touch panel display, jet washers, massage attachments, monsoon showerhead… If you don’t hear from me for weeks at a time it’s because I decided to live in there.

I can’t even attach the screenshot of my stats page so you’ll have to take my and Pineapple’s word for now. Over the weekend Sam had a snip over 210,000 downloads.

This is why I need to get Tormishire out!

Update: 377,894 downloads in the past 48 hours.

Update 2: 402,951 .

Inspired by NeoGaf I’ve made some box arts for my games (and TCFI by MrPineapple).

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Full DVD versions are available but they’re like so mega big with their filesize, so they’ll be offline for a bit.

Also the site will probably be undergoing maintenance. I’ve already started but it’s just a matter of getting into the guts of the coding to spruce the site up a bit. Planning a new gallery, new music playback system thingy, pages to be the width of the site (no sidebar). Might take a while since I’m busy with a few other things.