Okay, so I kind of dropped the ball here. If by dropped, you basically mean completely forget it about for 6 months. Whoops!

After name dropping it in a recent interview, I guess it’s time to let the cat out of the bag - the new game I’m working on is titled Backfire.

The end of year is always a unique time - a chance to reflect, ponder and make plans for moving on in the next year. For myself, it’s been a year which has been a significant burden to me, and I’ll be glad it’s over soon enough, and for 2016 to be a clean ground to try and make a better job of it.

So I played through The Beginner’s Guide over the weekend. Granted it was in two sessions (after the game crashed during a major bit), but as I guess its mission is to provoke a lot of personal reflection as a creator, then well, mission accomplished.

I’m hoping that what I say here doesn’t spoil it, but in case, I don’t think its worth reading this unless you’ve actually sat down and played it. Yes, it’s a ‘walking simulator’. Yes, it only lasts 90 minutes. But if you’re a creator, or interested in that angle of things, then I consider it an essential play.

This post is pretty much a bit of self-reflection as a creator - both of games, and of my retro gameplay videos - and just some thoughts about my motivations and desires with regard to it, based on some of the things which have been running through my head once I completed the game.

Last week, I was give the opportunity to present a piece at Freeplay’s Sunday Unconference talks. As you wouldn’t necessarily be surprised to think, it’s related to some of my experiences doing the channel, and how in general, there isn’t a lot of reflection backwards in gaming history - and why I think it’s actually worth doing it from time to time as developers & designers of games.

Thankfully, I was lucky to be able to record the talk, and whilst there was some noise over the intro & outro, the main talk itself came out rather well. So, using that, I synched up the audio with the slides I put together, and also replaced slides where I talked about a few retro games, with proper footage - and put the results up on YouTube for you all to watch.

Despite the problems in the outro, the links I included in the tail end are in the video description - and if anyone’s interested in more details, do shout out!

Comparing 2014 to 2013 is certainly an interesting exercise by comparison. Compared to last year, there weren’t as much AAA calibre games played - mainly as a result of two factors: the first being the channel and the workload in working on retro gameplay/LP videos, and secondly, my circumstances with regard to work meaning less time to sit in front of a console & play games there.

Much like last year, my tasted tended to split across multiple platforms - ranging from retro systems, to modern ones, as well as mobile devices. So, without further ado time to get onto this year’s list (which is in no real order… so no real biases here!) ma

It’s funny thinking about the last week. From both an entertainment standpoint, as well as from a developer-ish standpoint.

Commodore 64 Month is one of those things that will always fill me with excitement.

Just a bit of a quick post, but last week I had the opportunity to present at Melbourne Cocoaheads on the GameController framework which is part of iOS and Mac OS X.

I’ve been sitting on this final piece in my Looking to the Future series for quick a long period of time. In fact, I feel I’ve been doing so as I’ve not wanted to live up to the fact that well, I’m basically unsuited for indie life in any serious matter.