Microcosm Twitter Bot Header Image
by admin

Microcosm Twitter Bot

I set a goal for #30DayDev January to create a Twitter bot, there weren’t many requirements beyond that it had to retweet people using the hashtag. I can say that after the first week of January I have achieved that goal and released DevMicrocosm into the wild. It followed my rough plan for the project, using Python and Tweepy. This combination of language and library reaffirmed my expectation that it would be quick to develop and deploy.

Due to the Python being able to test commands directly in the terminal, it led to some fantastic opportunities to rapidly prototype some ideas, one of these was to use fully fledged configurations for multiple hashtags. This means that there is no need to redeploy the application every time you want to update what hashtags are being retweeted, you can simply change the config file and the next time the python file is run it’ll use the updated settings.

Continue reading →

30daydev plan header image
by admin

#30DayDev January

Sometime during 2016, I helped my friend Liam Twose found the hashtag #30DayDev and push it to become of the most widely used game development hashtags on Twitter with a huge number of people actively taking part and even more people seeing the content being developed by the hashtags ever-increasing reach. However, throughout 2017 activity wained as algorithms on hashtags were changed and focus was directed elsewhere into other endeavours. We decided it would be a good thing for the game development community at large to try and revive the hashtag going into the new year and this is what this post will cover, my plan of action for the first #30DayDev of 2018.

This month will be the first month I’ve gone into with a solid plan of how to tackle #30DayDev pretty much since its inception. I’m not solely focusing on game development this month with some time being dedicated to trying to help revive the hashtag as well. I’m essentially splitting my 30 days into 3 tasks; Twitter Bot, Super Blasty Blasty V2 and knowledge sharing. Between these 3 tasks, I think I should be able to learn a fair few new things as well as produce some quality content.

Continue reading →

Top Games 2017 Header Image
by admin

My Top Games of 2017

During 2017 I managed to get a fair few hours playing games compared to some other years, I even had the added benefit of having an extra platform to play them on with my purchase of a PS4. I won’t bother doing an arbitrary number of games for each platform but instead, I’ll do my favourite game of each and a runner-up. The platforms I’ll be commenting on are; PS4, Xbox One, PC and Mobile (Android). These games might not have been released in 2017 but they are ones I played in 2017 so they fit the criteria.

PS4 – Doom (2016)

Doom 2016 Header Image

The game I played and enjoyed the most on PS4 this year was actually a smash hit title from 2016, that I never got around to playing. Doom was the reboot that the first person genre needed. It was an absolute spectacle from start to finish with its flashy push forward combat feeling like the original games and yet still seeming surprisingly fresh. The graphics were outstanding and the framerate was solid on PS4 leaving nothing to be desired. The customization elements it had were great accents to an already excellent set of weapons that really catered to a few different playstyles. Doom is a game I’d confidently recommend to anybody who is a fan of games, even if they usually aren’t big on FPS games.

My runner-up this year on PS4 would have to be The Last Guardian, I never played Ico or Shadow of the Colossus but after playing this they are definitely on my list to play for 2018.

Continue reading →

Header image for my top shows of 2017
by admin

My Top 5 TV Shows Of 2017

2017 was an absolutely fantastic year for television, between the quality shows being aired on traditional TV to the new offerings by streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, we as viewers have been spoilt for choice. In this post, I’ll look at the 5 shows that grabbed me the most and I’d highly recommend giving any of them a try if you haven’t already.

Stranger Things (Season 2)

Stranger Things Season 2 Header

Stranger Things Season 1 was an absolutely fantastic show which grabbed me immediately. It has so many aspects which appealed to my inner geek that I ended up watching the whole series in a single weekend which is very rare for me. So when Season 2 arrived I had a lot of hype going into it. It lived up and even surpassed the hype. Everything was bigger, the stakes had been upped and the cast had clearly developed their skills since the first outing. Netflix knocked it out of the park with this series and the influence it has had on TV and movies is obvious. I’m planning on doing exactly the same when Season 3 hits screens and marathoning it.

Continue reading →

Header image for the Microcosm Framework
by admin

The Microcosm Framework

Over the course of my past few game development projects, I’ve had to write a lot of code multiple times and every time I’ve been slightly more inconvenienced by it. This ends up wasting valuable time that could be spent doing fun stuff. So I decided enough was enough and I’d create a reusable framework for use with all of my future projects. The premise was simple, I’d outline a set of basic requirements that every project I work on will have and then create a unity package I can import at the start of development to avoid having to try bodge implementations from other projects into a new one.

The initial requirements were simple; a menu system, basic AdMob integration, generic object pooling and simple game management systems to track state/play sounds/etc. These were picked as the requirements because they were the things that I had found the most tedious to set up fresh in every project. However, as I began implementing these features it dawned on me that this limited scope would definitely need to be expanded, what if I wanted Analytics in my games? I would need to first update the framework and then update the package in all subsequent projects it was used in. With the thought of a tedious upgrade process in mind, I went back to the drawing board for my requirements. The final scope was far bigger but added far more value to my future projects, these components and why I chose them are explained in detail below.

Continue reading →