Since I’m doing a lot of promotion lately, I though I’d get some business cards knocked up. I spent a bit of time looking at local printing companies but they were all either expensive or just plain awkward to get a quote from. Then I remembered the UK based online printing company Moo. They used to sell postcards and various other printed goodies, but now they also sell business cards. You get to upload your own pictures (up to 50) and choose the text on the back via a neat and simple web interface.
I took a bunch of screen shots from my demos and had them printed on the fronts of the cards. On the back is an Ate Bit logo along with my contact details. There are eight different card designs…. gotta catch ‘em all!
I ordered them on Tuesday, they arrived today. They’re ace :)
Yesterday I held my demoscene seminar at the University of Abertay. The audience of around 30 people was a good mix of University staff and students as well as members of the local gamedev community. I spent a little over an hour giving a brief introduction to the scene and showing some of the best demos from the past few years. The complete list of demos that I showed is available here
At the end of the seminar I put up a slide with some links to websites that provide further info on the demoscene. These were:
demoscene.tv - A great site with high quality video captures of demos. Check out their “What is demoscene” link on the right-hand side of the main page.
scene.org - An “offical” demoscene site. Scene.org is a non-profit organisation providing free web-hosting and support to demo groups. The site contains news stories and forums. Scene.org is sponsored by such high profile companies as NVIDIA, Pixar and Media Molecule.
pouet.net - A site whose goal is to list every demoscene product ever released. This is the best place to find information on demos. It’s also a good place to find all demos released by your favourite groups. Note that the forums on this site are not for the feint of heart!
Finally, thank you *so much* to everyone who came along. Hopefully you all enjoyed yourselves and were inspired to find out more about the modern demoscene. If you have any comments or questions then please feel free to leave a comment here or email me at demoscene-at-evilpaul-dot-org.
Last Saturday we held the second Dundee Jam. This is an event where a bunch of slightly foolhardy developers gather together to create games in the space of a single day. The theme for the Jam this time was “build”.
Below you can see a screen grab from my days work - a game called “Up The Garden Path”. It’s very loosely based on the game of Dominoes, with the aim being to build a path from the start line to the finish by matching the colours on the Domino pieces.
I’m pretty pleased with it for a days work. It’s a fun little game but it’s not going to set the gaming world on fire. However, with a few more levels and some more features it could be a lot of fun.
Download the game here: download game
I’ve also made the full source to the game available, so you can see just what a days coding looks like. It also provides an example of how to program my free 2D games engine, the Jam Engine.
You can find the full story and all of the other games over on the official site: Dundee Jam website
It used to be a fairly regular event: gather a group of friends together, post-pub, at the house with the biggest projector screen we could find and watch demos. I’d always end up as the curator, either choosing the demos myself or interpreting the calls of the audience (”Show us that cool new 64k one!”). It was a little like DJing I suppose, and I’ve always enjoyed doing that too.
Since then I’ve always wanted to take things to a bigger stage and introduce the demoscene to a wider audience. I even had wild ideas of projecting MFX demos (like A Deepness In The Sky) on to the sides of buildings just to mess with people’s heads…
Luckily, I no longer have to think about resorting to such guerilla tactics. The University of Abertay in Dundee have very kindly agreed to lend me one of their cinema rooms, and I’m taking the opportunity to run a little demoscene outreach event there. So, on Friday the 6th June, I’ll be showing some of the best and most accessible demos from the past few years and giving a bit of a background talk in a shameless attempt to get more people interested in the demoscene ;)
Once the event is over, I will post details of the demos shown. Wish me luck!
[edit] Here’s a picture of the back of the flyer with a map to the venue. Click on the thumbnail to enlarge it.
My last two demoscene releases have certainly raised a bit of interest. They’ve both appeared on several forums and done really well on sites like Pouet. Even more interesting though is when they get picked up in places that I really wouldn’t have expected…
First off, Pimp My Chips has appeared in the UK magazine “Computer Music” as the Production of the Month in their demoscene related column “Totally Trackers”. Click on the thumbnail below for a larger image:
Secondly, Pimp My Spectrum was picked up by GameSetWatch.com, a blog run by the people behind the excellent Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra site. See the story here:
GameSetWatch story
Just got back from the Breakpoint 08 demo party in Germany. Around 30 UKSceners turned up and a great time was had by all. The best part for me though was winning the PC 64k demo competition with the Ate Bit demo “Pimp My Spectrum”.
Find the demo on Pouet: Pimp My Spectrum
Or grab it directly from here: Direct download
What makes this demo a bit different is that it is essentially a tricked out Spectrum emulator and a demo combined into a 64k. Stay tuned for more info on how that works but for now you can check out a brief overview by reading the accompanying text file. You can find this either in the downloadable .zip file or by clicking on the [nfo] link in the top right of the Pouet page.
As you may have guessed - this isn’t *all* my own work. Massive thanks to Mofobaru for the tune, the two Andys (both from Denki) for 2D and 3D graphics and Diver (from 4th Dimension) for the marvellous picture that you see above. Without them this demo could never have been made.
PS: At the time of writing, out of all (just under 100) of the Breakpoint 08 prods that have been added to Pouet, Pimp My Spectrum is the 5th most “thumbed up” and the 6th most popular =)
We here at Denki ran our first one day “Game Jam” over the weekend and the results are mightily impressive. The idea is that we take a bunch of programmers and artists and try to produce some game sketches, guided by a common theme. The theme for this jam was “Survive” and I used this to develop the idea of a hardcore minimalistic bullet hell game: Bullet Hell Survive
You can download the game from here: http://dundeejam.com/Jams/20080223/jam_2008_02_23.html#bhs
The day was a massive success with half a dozen excellent games being produced. You can find everything at the official Dundee Jam website.
The other thing about this Jam that I am particularly proud of is that three of the entrants produced their games with my new “Jam Engine”. This is a dead simple C++ game engine written specifically for use in the Jam. The philosophy behind the engine’s design was to produce a real black-box style system that could be coded for without needing to know anything about the underlying hardware or OS and without needing to get your hands dirty. It uses DirectX for 2D graphics and Bass for the audio but could be re-written to use other APIs without changing the external interface - This also means that any games written with the engine could be made cross-platform with just a simple engine update. The coder gets a nice clean, intuitive and simple to use interface to both of these systems as well as mouse and keyboard input, debugging support ( handy asserts and message logging ) and a high resolution frame timer. In short - the Jam Engine has pretty much everything you need for making quick game prototypes but without any extra fat! The plan is to eventually release the engine as open source ( or at least as a free to use library ) and this will probably happen around the time of Jam #2.. which is already in planning ;)
I’ve been working on this ( not so ) secret side-project for quite some time now. I think it may have started as far back as 2005. At that time it was going to be a cross-platform ( OSX and PC ) musicdisk with tracks from UK scene artists. Over the years the project has changed considerably, but some things have remained - most of the code from that first version still exists in the final build, the bespoke scripting language that makes the product highly data-driven has remained and the desire to release a musicdisk packed with excellent music has never waivered
So what have I ended up with? Well.. I have a PC musicdisk that I am extremely proud of, containing 11 absolutely awesome covers of pop songs all performed on the sound chip from a ZX Spectrum. The four artists who contributed these tracks have provided some amazing material and it really is an honour to distribute them in this way. I hope you enjoy listening to these tunes as much as I have
Check out Pimp My Chips on Pouet: Pimp My Chips on Pouet
Or head straight here for the direct download: Pimp My Chips direct download
Update..
The vtx files are now available here
There’s some kind of unoffical 256byte twister compo going on in demoscene world over the past week or two. It started off on the C64 where we have some great intros ( exhibit 1, exhibit 2 ) and has already inspired a platform jump for this neat Javascript version ( exhibit 3 )
Spending a couple of days off work with a stinking cold and in need of something light to stop my brain from seizing up, I thought I’d take the fight to the Spectrum..
There’s ceratinly room for improvement here, so let’s see if anyone else will take this further on the ZX platform
Find it on Pouet here: zxwister
Or download it directly here: zxwister direct download
Full source can be found inside the zip file
More poor quality party photos! This time they’re from Breakpoint 2007
The ( rather small ) flickr photoset is here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/evilpaul_atebit/sets/72157603523986388/
