Windosill

Stumbled across this game this morning and was blown away by the beauty and complexity of the game, I dont want to think about the amount of code that must of gone into making this beast!

Play Here

Francais '09

Well im finally back in Manchester after my little trip to the south of France. Had a splendid time eating, drinking and working on my tan. We also went to a wedding of two friends on the last couple of days.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself, but now im back im looking forward to getting stuck in to my new job starting Monday (more coming on that) and finishing off some of my existing projects (BlastWave, WorldsBestFlashGames) so I can finally get stuck into some iPhone dev!

As per usual I have uploaded the pictures and videos to my picassa account, but here are some highlights:

Dev Update: BlastWave - Lost At Sea

Oliver and I have been working hard on the game and we are almost ready to rock.

We are wanting to go for a significantly more polished feel to this game and one of the factors that has been abit rough around the edges in the past has been the menu systems. As mentioned in a previous dev update were were looking to for something like Photon Storm's Kyobi as a splash screen:



Also we have decided to jump on the micro-payments train and offer unlockable levels likely via the mochi-coins system:



For the price of about $1 you will get 20 more levels with new puzzle features. We are also considering implementing an achievements system with an in-game "best of the best" leader board, but we haven't quite worked out where to put that yet ;)

Now the game is mostly feature complete its onto the slow laborious process of trying to find sponsors for the game.

Im off to France for 10 days tomorrow however so apart from a few emails, work will have to be suspended on this project for a little while. When I return I shall be starting at my new job (more on that when im back!)

New Mix: Coalescence

Wow! Well this one was a hell of alot easier to make than the last one.

Instead of trying to tell a story with film samples and a large overarching theme I have instead just let this one naturally progress and take its course. The consequence of this, I think anyway, the transitions are alot softer and more natural giving a good easy listen.

I have called this one "Coalescence" as it contains a rather different mixture of tracks that I have coalesced together. It still has that chilled-downtempo IDM-esq sound that I love so much at the moment with tracks by Jon Hopkins, Trifonic but I have also included some other tracks I have acquired on my eclectic audio adventures.

Anyways I hope you enjoy it, I think its probably my best mix since my Harmonics 1 and 2.

Coalescent by Artificial on Mixcloud

Domains so Many Domains!

Well I have just had my next (not so) bright idea. I have decided to enter the flash games portal business. I see it as a good way to compliment my flash games interest and passion.

I have just gone out and bought the following domains:

http://www.worldsbestflashgames.com
http://www.worldsbestpuzzle.com
http://www.worldsbestrpg.com
http://www.worldsbestshooter.com
http://www.worldsbestdressup.com
http://www.worldsbesttowerdefence.com

As you can see I have decided to go for a niche genre with each of the domains. For now they all point to the main domain http://www.worldsbestflashgames.com but hopefully I will give them all their own space soon.

As for their implementation I plan on using Worpress as the back-end with the Gallery mod for the Thematic theme (the same setup im using on http://www.artificialgames.co.uk).

Ill report back when its all setup and I actually have some games to play!

Panic over, nginx comes to the rescue

A while back I changed my hosting over from the worse than dismal streamline.net over to the much better slicehost service. Slicehost offer alot more power by giving your own server with root access. All well and good if you are knowing what you are doing in Linux, i dont, so I struggled for some time getting Apache and php and all the rest running nice.

Well all was fine and dandy for a while but suddenly a month or so back I started having alot of drop-outs and poor service. After much pain and forum posting I finally found out the route cause of the problem was that Apache was using too much memory and just bringing everything to a crawl on my 256meg slice. After much more pain I got the alternative nginx web server going, and touch wood everything seems to be running nice and smooth again, yey!

I would like to give a big thank you to this article which was invaluable: http://www.mensk.com/webmaster-toolbox/perfect-ubuntu-hardy-nginx-mysql5-php5-wordpress/

Monkey Dressup

My partner in crime Oliver P has just  released a little game. Its catered for a very specific, yet popular, crowd. Yes yes its a dress up game, but it has very nice graphics so I think its definately worth a mention ;)

New Laptop = iPhone Fun!

Just acquired a shiny new 15" MacBook Pro, so I can do some iPhone stuff, yey :D