Games

When I'm not tinkering in the workshop (check out my YouTube channel for the latest builds) I like to make games with some being showcased by the BBC. You can play some of them here. 

About Me
I love designing, I love making things and I love encouraging creativity in the people I meet. I’m not a huge fan of Comic Sans. I am an experienced trainer and bespoke systems author, with a background of over 15 years database administration and systems analyst experience. I like to develop in my spare time whilst teaching and encouraging others to do the same.

I love working with people of all ages and abilities, teaching the skills needed to complete a task or project. So if you have an idea for an app or project but are new to programming and electronics, then I might be able to help. I’m also starting to write a few Instructables that I hope will help and inspire budding makers too.



I am the founder of First Coding, Salisbury’s first coding school. Established in 2017, First Coding offers comprehensive coding lessons for children aged between 7 and 14 years old. Covering the important concepts of programming in a fun and creative environment, First Coding helps provide the building blocks for your child to build on their creative ideas whilst all the time gaining confidence in computing.


Popular posts from this blog

Building a Zoltar Fortune Teller: Part One

Image
I have always thought the mechanical fortune teller machines where a thing of wonder and I've always wondered about making one myself.  I have previously experimented with making a proof of concept miniature version here but as I had some spare time on my hands I decided to scale up to a full sized cabinet. I started by rescuing an old wardrobe that was skipped and used the panels to put together the bottom half of the cabinet. The intention is to have the bottom half collecting the money and dispensing fortune cards, with the top half house Zoltar in a framed enclosure. I removed the insides of the miniature fortune teller and made sure they still work. A friend of mine gave me a nice 1d coin panel and I made sure that this worked with the existing coin acceptor. The brains of Zoltar runs off a simple Microbit . I love these little programmable boards, they're easy to use as well as cheap and are perfect for projects like this. The code is surprisingly simple too. The Microbi
Read more

Building a Ziggy Handheld

Image
Quantum Leap was an obsession of mine during the 90s and I'm still a huge fan of the show even now. As we'll be off to another comic con shortly, I wanted to try and make another prop to take along to the even and the Ziggy handheld that featured in the original series seemed a great ideas as it would be challenging to make but would be easy to carry around with me on the day. The short video below details how it was made with downloadable resources further down this page. The first thing I did was to pull up some reference material in the form of screenshots that clearly shows the handheld. There are also props that you can buy and the images they had on the various websites were a lot more detailed. From here I was able to build a simple model from within Tinkercad . I made sure I included the main blocks of the design and made up the more smaller components. I thought if I could achieve the general look and outline of the handheld, then it will be easily recognisable. I want
Read more

Squirrel Falls Devlog Update

Image
I've been putting in the hours with regards to bug fixing and polishing my Game Boy game, Squirrel Falls. I came up with the idea of handing out a version of the game to my pupils as I know they wouldn't hold back with regards to their feedback. I've been reading up on the whole feedback process and there seems to be a common theme developing recently. That is, that people testing and playing the games don't want to hurt the developer's feelings and so are selective on what feedback they provide. This results in the quality and standard of games dropping. As I thought, my pupils were honest, really honest. They did actually pick up on a couple of issues that I'd overlooked and so more time and effort has been spent ironing out the issues. I'm really happy with the current version and I've recorded a bit of gameplay, stepping through the major changes. It's now a case of adding in little extras. As I would like the player to explore the map more and t
Read more