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Rise From Your Grave!

I’ve had a bit of an unintentional break from games, 7 or eight years in fact, and it’s been almost 10 years since I released my last game, Son of Scoregasm, on PS Vita and PC. During this time I’ve been working as a chef, running a local kitchen. It’s been quite good fun!

That job has come to an end now, so I have more time to dedicate to writing games and maintaining my back catalog. It is my intention this year to get my older games running properly on modern PC platforms as all of them in their current states are broken in some way.

I’d like also to revisit some of those older titles, re-invent them a little and make them generally more appealing for new players. It’s been 20 years since my first game launched, which I guess makes it retro. 20 years prior to it’s release (1986) saw the release of SEGA’s Outrun, Nintendo’s first Metroid and Zelda games, Llamasoft’s incredibly difficult Iridis Alpha, early doors real time 3D shooter Starglider on the Atari ST and style over substance pioneer Defender of the Crown, all of which were pretty much digital antiques by 2006.

To this end I’ve been working on writing some new code that will help me port my older games to modern C APIs. The oldest of my games were written in a now dead language called Blitzmax which, fortunately, is syntactically similar to C, and though I’ll need to re-write the code completely it won’t be a complicated job.

I’ve decided to use the latest version of SDL as a base for this project. The new SDL_GPU 3D API abstraction library is pretty good based on what I’ve tried so far, and will definitely save me a lot of time porting to other platforms as well as opening up web games via emscriptem.

I’ve got the basics of 2D rendering, input and a few other bits up and running which you can take a look at over on my GitHub page. It’s early doors and the scripts will only run on Linux like OSes so far. I’ll get Windows building added soon. There’s a couple of examples there to show how to use it. Blitzmax was always very good at quick prototyping and generally getting out of the way and leaving you to code. I’m intending to maintain this as best I can in my homage to it.

The current plan is to get Bullet Candy, my oldest game, updated by the middle of June, with Irukanji to follow shortly after. Bullet Candy has many, many different versions. Distributors were plentiful back in the noughties before Steam really took over, and often they’d want something platform specific in their version of the game. Many of these custom bits were just cosmetic, but there’s a couple of game modes that aren’t in the current Steam and itch.io builds, some extra levels here and there etc. which would be good to put back, as well as things from the various prototypes of the game that were cut due to time or lack of ability on my part back then.

That’s all for now. I’ll have more to show next update…

Cheers Charlie.