I've finally got a flat sorted out and paid the deposit and rest of the rent for this month so that's one major life stress sorted out. I'll be sharing with two other games programmers, Ben and Martin, (from Realtime Worlds and 4J Studios respectively and one of the artists, Lee, I work with at Caveman. It's a brand new, really well decorated townhouse so it makes an awesome change to some of the nastier places I lived in as a student. We move in next week so it will be a relief to get off of Bob's floor!
Other than that we have seen one of our games Jetski Champion rolled out to some Asian companies and we are about to put it up on Click Gamer also. Our new title Sub-Zero Racer is pretty much complete and ready to ship out. Piccies below:
Jetski Champion
Sub-Zero Racer
Whilst they both look similar and are based on the same core tech they both play remarkably differently which is ace. Work has already started on our next, unannounced title so off we go again.
Our biggest challanges of late have again been caused by damn Motorolas and thier poor garbage collection and general handling of memory. It's pretty damn hard to avoid colossal fragmentation and makes me yearn for the ability to handle your own memory management strategy! Thankfully my bluetooth dongle won't work with the motorolas so our other coder has taken the brunt of trying to organise resource loading in a way that means we don't kill the heap. Meanwhile I have been wrestling with our unholy AI system which seems determined to be non-deterministic. However the pain and frustration has lead through to a decent experience for the player.
...and damn those pesky motorolas!