More pirate themed puzzles. this time the puzzle from Tortuga 2008

This time the aim of the puzzle was to extract the order of 7 words that formed the instructions for the next part of the puzzle. Those seven words have now been lost, but this part of the puzzle still works just fine

The puzzle from the previous years had been given out a month before the event, to get people excited and give them a bit of time to mull over various possible answers. In previous years, the puzzle had often fallen in a few days or weeks. So I made this one a little bit harder. turns out I may have made it a little too hard. It was solved, but not by many

Who doesn't love pirates? I imagine the number has dropped a little since they now seem to be everywhere. I liked them before they were cool *put on hipster glasses*

For many years I provided the games and puzzles (and a lot of nonsense) for a pirate themed gathering amongst 40-50 of my friends. I recently rediscovered the lost image files for most of the puzzles that featured in each one and thought it would be fun to share them with the wider world (not that my website readership is all that wide).

First off is thise one from 2007. The aim was to work out the numeric combinations of three tumbler locks that were all attached to a single chest.

Tortuga 2007

This is a reasonably tricky puzzle. Sadly I fell a bit flat when one of the (far too cheap) locks seized up on the day and the hinges of the chest had to be removed for the treasure to finally be won

I still have the chest; and it still has a broken lock attached to it.

To replace the drab colours that I originally did for HippyLizard I created these

Download Desktop Version

as with many of my personal projects, the rest of the work on the site coding itself is 'onging'

Sometime is good to realize that a project idea is so intractable and unwieldy that it's best to just stop before you even really get started. Luckily this was the case with an internet based isometric game I nearly started

It was to be a sort of turn based, fantasy, strategy game. Whether or not it's game play would have worked was heavily reliant on whether I could find the best (and most fun) way of implementing the magic system which was to work very much more like chemistry, and less like dice

Well, it was just too massive a piece of work, so it was dropped. All I have now is a odd tile based board game (a little bit like dominoes) and this image I made of some example world land tiles.

Tiles

As a break from the trend of things taking longer and longer. This one came about reasonably quickly. If it's not obvious from the name it's a bit Blade Runner themed, complete with cheesy film samples

I'm sure it'll be less than a week before I decide it's terrible and start wanting to mess with (or delete) bits of it.

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As ever, updating my website ends up at the bottom of my to-do list for months on end. Well, I've got a pile or stuff sorted and ready to be uploaded, so expect light flurries of random artwork and other nonsense over the next few days and weeks.

The long term forecast is still of significant dry patches, but we'll see I guess. It helps that I know that at least a few people actually look at this rubbish. Here's a sneak peek

It would be easy to think that work on my current personal project 'Moon' has ground to a halt. I can tell you for sure that isn't the case. Though to the casual observer a few hours a month probably looks very much like halted.

A great deal of my time has been spent making bits of engine code that do specific but ultimately non-game things like generate voxel based collision meshes so the character doesn't float about in space, load file from the internet so I can support updates or just a renderer that doesn't crash at random times so I don't get angry emails from players.

I'm sure every track I make takes twice as long as the one that preceeded it. In this case my decision to do all the music score from scratch instead of relying as much on samples probably had something to do with it.

I'm sure I'll look back on it at some point in the future and hate it for it's simplicity but for now I'm pretty happy with the result.

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As I've now decided to care and worry a little less about the quality of and size of the posts I put on here I thought I'd share something purely experimental. This is the result of some of my research into the perfect choice for natural light colours. Intensity from top to bottom and temperature from left to right.

In the past I'd have worried about my lack of a complete description here and probably not posted this. Times have changed, enjoy the pretty colours.

And so it seem that nearly six months has passed since I last gave any indication of activity. I suspect that finally deciding I needed a change from my old job and going through the process of ending over ten years of employment has taken it's toll on my capacity for concentration outside of work.

Very happily, I now work alongside the highly skilled ninjas at Double Eleven on some really exciting projects. It's great to have my brain worked again, learning lot's of new stuff, getting into a new code base and generally firing on all cylinders. It's also great to be looking forward again.

On the down side this has all meant that I've not really achieved much progress on Project Moon, or anything else for that matter. Hopefully not being out of the house for 12 hours a day anymore will mean I get some serious development time in the not too distant future.

Unless you've actually ever made a computer game you may not be aware of how complex the process really is. This isn't a boast with which I intend to inflate my ego, or some excuse for the time such endevours take. It's just a stamement of fact about the way things are.

Computer games are not alone in the set of all activities that are challenging, nor are they sole occupant of the set of things that when done well appear to the end user (or target audience) as usable and approachable. However, they also occupy the set of things who's creation feels like it should be simpler than it really is. Who's creation is filled with little things that on the surface seem simple but turn out to be filled with layers of complexity. I think in that, they may well be alone.

As an excercise next time you play a computer game, consider what complexity might hide behind simply making your character move, jump or attack as you'd expect when you press a button (obviously assuming you've chosen game that has a character in it). You may be suprised, and unless you've ever written the code for it, I'd put money on being able to show you something your character does that you didn't realise to give you that feeling of responsiveness, fairness and enjoyment.

Project Moon - Very Rough

This happened In a fit of creativity one sunday afternoon. I had a need to do something with lots of bold broad colours and heavy duty composition. In all it took about 6 hours.

Its acrylic on canvas and about 3 feet from top to bottom.

I also created a desktop version of it for those that might be interested

Download Desktop

At the start of 2009 I created a simple puzzle game called Efficiency. Despite being a simple project that I put together in a few weeks it turned out to be much more popular than I ever expected.

Over time I got lots of people asking me to fix It's biggest failing. A total lack of functionality on Windows 7.

So here by popular demand, is a new and marginally improved version of Efficiency (which to celebrate I've added a ' + ' to). It should work fine on windows 7, it's got much nicer procedurally generated music and it's even got a few added bits and little fixes.

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Having enjoyed making 'I am' back in 2006 I decided to give the whole poem/music combo thing another go. This time I chose 'A dream within a dream' by Edgar Allen Poe. Like many of the poems by Poe, it's probaly been used and abused plenty of times already so I thought one more couldn't hurt.

This track took an absolute age to put together. Not because it was complex, but because I had real trouble finding the right sound and parts for it. In the end I got a little fed up with it and just wanted it finished.

I have mixed feelings about the final result. On one hand it's instruments are not perfect and some of the sample transitions are jarring. On the other hand it's probably one of the best drum tracks I've ever made. That alone got it on here (you'll have to get past the first half to really hear the whole drum section running)

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