The Rusty Rocket

I have a rough concept of the game. Thoughts now turn to the environment and map the player will be playing in. I've played a great many settlement building games lately, for research purposes you understand ;) (Try out  Dorfromanik  by the way) and I think playing the game in an isometric view works really well and is a nice nod to the old world building games that I used to play. I've also been giving some consideration to how the player will journey through the map and have gone for a simple 2x2 grid system to start with, with players unlocking new areas of the map as they progress through the game. I had an idea for the initial cloud harvester the player has access to at the start of the game. This will raise its cloud catcher up into the air before retracting it to decanter the collected moisture. From here on in I am going to use simple place holders as the game evolves to make sure the mechanics are working before investing any real time in building aesthetics. I h...

This is the start of a dev log of my game Cloud Storage. A settlement building simulation set in a dry, desert world where water is the last remaining natural resource. Harvest the moisture locked in the clouds to upgrade and trade with other players to advance your settlement and increase your chances of survival. The initial idea Inspiration for games come in many forms, I usually use the weekly game jams to help get the creative gears moving. This is great for short blasts of game making but for a longer build I needed to look elsewhere and it wasn't long before something of interest came my way. I'm not sure how I came across it and it took me a while to track it down again but this short video of an animation really got me thinking. I love the idea of some planes fighting for resources whilst others are trying to better the situation. Wouldn't it be great to include similar dilemmas and situations in a game of survival. To the sketchbook! There is always a slight sense...

I've been wanting to put together a podcast for some time now, learning what it takes to plan, record and edit episode in order to learn a few new skills. As I'm on a game dev mission for 2021, it makes a great deal of sense to base my podcast's content on next year's adventures. A few months ago I built a simple recording rig that I can carry around and unpack whenever I wanted to record, stream or even broadcast with the help of my modified FM transmitter. I wanted to explore the uses of everyday space and how people form their own spaces in which to create in. A combination of game development topics and exploring other people's creative spaces would make interesting content for a podcast and seeing as though I intend to get people talking about their workspaces, it seemed only fair that I talk about mine that I recently built. You can hear the recording below. It turns out that talking and playing on the arcade cabinet is really rather difficult. Listening ba...

There is something very special about an arcade cabinet and I've made a couple in the past with varying degrees of success as I try and recreate that strong nostalgic feeling I have for retro gaming. Now that I'm more familiar with the process of building cabinets I decided to see how cheaply I could build me next one and this is the process I followed. For those wishing to make one but don't have the space then maybe you would be interested in building one of my smaller miniature versions here . This is the finished product, a Mario themed table top arcade machine running a Retropie set up and as most of the material was sourced from scrap, the whole project (not including the cost of the monitor) came it at just over £20. The buttons were the first purchased I made as you can't have a cabinet without necessary joystick and buttons. if you hunt around on eBay and prepared to wait a while for them to be shipped from China, you can find a USB joystick and button set for ...

Have you ever wanted to start your own radio station? For a number of years, I have. Even from an early age I've always been fascinated with radio and this is probably why so many of my projects are radio-based. My most recent project is my pop-up pirate radio box that's designed to serve two purposes. The first will be to stream my broadcasts online using Anchor ( https://anchor.fm ) and there are really easy to follow tutorials on YouTube if you wish to give it a go yourself. Secondly it will broadcast over FM with the help of a series of modified in-car FM transmitters (my video tutorial can be found here ) relaying the online stream of the broadcast at various locations. I have put together a short video on how the pop-up pirate box was built and what plans I have for it. Now let's rewind a little bit to understand how I got here. The pirate box uses a similar set up to a previous radio beacon project of mine. At the heart of the FM beacon lies the Microbit , w...

This was my very first contact card. It was printed off on paper as an afterthought as I need something quick before I left for an event in Southampton where I would be showcasing my android chatbot app. I handed a great many of these out but have deliberately kept a few back to remind of an important lesson that day. I learnt something very important at that event, and that was you don't have to have everything completely polished and complete. If you have a good idea and you're enthusiastic and have the right intentions, people won't mind receiving your details on a slither of paper. It was time to get some proper cards made up though in time for my next event. As I try and achieve things for as less money as possible with whatever I do, I found an offer online for free business card sample packs and took advantage of it. For years now I've been branded with rockets, rusty rockets and have done ever since I chose my first Hotmail email address back in the l...

I have previously built arcade cabinets from scratch and wanted to build another one now that I'm more familiar with the build process. However, after seeing the work of Small Change Arcade , I was inspired to build a miniature arcade machine instead and wondered how small could I go. This tabletop arcade with a Raspberry Pi Zero running Retropie was the result and I love it. I also set myself an additional task of sourcing the materials from what I already had about the place in a bid to keep costs low and to prove that you can make good use of practically anything. As I was about to throw way some old IKEA CD drawers, I looked at one of them and could instantly see how this could be repurposed as a mini desktop arcade due to its shape. Now I've never been very good at measuring things for projects accurately, nor am I very good at carpentry but that's never put me off before. I set about roughly cutting out the desired shape with a saw and was able to make ...