That's right, the demo of our first game, TurnShip, is now available for Windows and Mac, as well as the source! Go and get it here!

Basic requirements: 512MB+ RAM, 1GHz CPU.

Have fun!

Propellor, Battery and myself were at Coventry University's Creative Computing show, Smoke and Mirrors!

Battery was exhibiting his (goddamn hard) shooter, Laika. I was playing it for a while, starting out in an exhibiting-it sort of way, but as it went on I got more determined to win. I never actually managed to beat it! I think Battery cheats, when he plays it and finishes with three lives left.

There were a lot of really interesting exhibits (the ones that caught our collective eye were A* pathfinding in a 3D asteroid field, a realtime temperature-mapping program, and some sort of sequential art, but on the internet. Terry Richards, by the way, is such a hulking beast of a man that he cannot use puny mice, and as such has to use a custom joypad to game on PC.)

After seeing the exhibits, in Propellor's case going to a band practice, and in my case swapping URLs on someone else's business cards, me and Prop went down and kicked some ass in the LAN room. The 11-kill-streak as Medic and Heavy on TF2 was a high point, although the mice in that room were crap.

After that it was time for the film show, in which TurnShip was featured briefly (with the caption Ratchet and Propellor Games, haha), and then finally everyone went to the pub, where we annoyed people with my theremin and discussed the merits of Python over C, and C over Java. And how you need two people to do some things with keyboard shortcuts in emacs.

There are some photos uploaded on facebook, by the organiser/tutor in charge; Pete might upload some of the photos he took, although I think he took most trying to blind people with his flash in the pub.

Next week, we might have anything from progress on Bounce to painting and weird stuff.

We've all been pretty busy this week, so not much has got done on TurnShip. I've been busy on my final-album-slash-Platformer-soundtrack, with three new songs up here.

There is something else though. But I probably shouldn't tell you.

Well.. all right, but come a bit closer. Ok. I've been working on something and it's going pretty well.

Uh, I guess I could give you a little peek.. don't tell anyone else though.


Shh!

No real blog post, this week; I've been having a week off after getting some big coursework in, and Propellor and Battery have both been still working on theirs.

Myself and Propellor both use Macs, so I thought I'd tell anyone who hasn't heard: the Steam service is coming to Mac! It's dated for April (which, in Valve Time means late May), and all of Valve's Source games are coming to Mac too (for the uninitiated, that means TF2, Portal, the LH2 series, the L4D series) and Portal 2 is going to be a simultaneous release on PC and Mac.

I'm posting that here because, well, for one thing we really like Valve and want to be like them as a studio as we get bigger. The other reason is, our new target for development is to get some of our games on Steam!

Don't expect TurnShip, because that's almost done in Python and we can't be bothered to redo it; likewise don't expect our more experimental games like Life (although prop still holds TurnShip is an experiment as an excuse to not work on it).

However, Platformer, and then Simulation, will both get submitted for Steam when they're done. They'll be cheap, and we'll have decent-length demos of them for free. We're pretty fired up for it!

First, though: TurnShip. The demo is so damn close to being done, it's almost causing physical pain. Expect it soon!

Nothing particularly specific going on this week, although it may be a different story quite soon.

I'll break down what I'm talking about today into categories: Site updates, Platformer, TurnShip, and Further Endeavours.


So firstly, the website... >