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

I've mentioned it from time to time, but as yet I've not really gone into any real detail about the development of my iO project. In this post I hope to remedy that a little starting with some history.

Some years ago (around 2004/2005) I created a somewhat complex game concept which for lack of a better name I called 'spod'. It was a robot construction game in which you were tasked to create a team of automated battle robots and pit them against teams created by other people (or and AI opponent). Without doubt it was far (far far) to ambitious, and as such it was never completed.

I've put aside iO, and it's now become clear how much it was stopping me getting ideas out of my head. Without doubt, Its constantly changing form helped improve my programming skills and has resulted in dozens of added features to my game and rendering engine, but ultimatly no real (fun) game was going to result any time soon.

The engine has (and will continue to serve) as a great test-bed for ideas and tools in my profession but I think for the most part it now has no real use to me for making games. It's based on the now aging DirectX 9 and targeted soley at the PC, a combination that is unlikely to feature in the future of games creation as a whole for very much longer.

You may have just assumed that the lack of updates was simply a return to my usual update rate. For once this wasn't the case.

You probably noticed while attempting to navigate the site in it's previous incarnation that your 'back' button didn't work as you'd expect. This was all due to me trying to be too clever. I'd made quite significant attempts to keep the address bar nice and neat, wishing (pointlessly) to avoid lots of garbage appended to the end of the address. This just lead to everything not working properly and the site being mostly un-navigable.

So, in January, I set about fixing it

As the title suggests, I have just spent quite a long time writing a long and interesting post about all sorts of exciting things. Sadly I took so long to write this epic my session timed out and I lost the whole lot when I submitted it. This is mainly as a result of some error in my website code. I'll put the job of fixing it on my list of things to do once I finish my time machine.

So in an attempt to present at least a little of the lost content and avoid the chance of losing it all again, what follows is a simple summary in the style of an FAQ.