stuckieGAMEZ

Site Work

Tue, 18 Sep 2018 19:50:00 +0000

This site has been stuck in a rut for quite a while, with broken images and all sorts for a couple of years after the import from Wordpress.

I’ve now gone through everything, added missing projects and images, and recategorised things… it should now be pretty complete. There are a few things still missing - downloads for older projects mainly, and a details for a few odd projects - but the most interesting bits and pieces should be here now.

Where possible, things have links to SoundCloud where I put most of the music, and to either my own GitHub repo or the Arcade Badgers GitHub repo where there is source available.

It’s been an interesting year for me in general. A lot of ups and downs.

Starting with the downs first… both kids had their appendices removed at the start of Summer - within three weeks of each other. I swear you cannot put odds on that. So that meant they were stuck inside in what turned out to be a rather glorious Summer for a change. Not long afterwards however, Claire’s grandmother passed away… and not long after that again, Loki passed away - to which I posted about below. We’ve also still been fighting with the debt, with another magic bill pulled out of HMRC’s thin air.

On to the good, however.

While the debt has been a pest, we’re getting through it.. with the hope of being completely clear of the lot of it by the end of the year! Hurrah! I’ve also found time to work on a few projects, from JS1K with Pollute at the beginning of the year, through to LowRezJam with Pixel Beard and JS13k with -link> just this month. Also, YoYo released the Nintendo Switch export for GameMaker Studio 2! Or the Open Beta anyway, with the final to be done soon-ish.

So, it’s been an interesting year.. and it’s not finished yet.

The idea is to do another odd experimental thing, and then finally (FINALLY) finish off Snake-A-Roid 2.0 as I’m slowly getting tired of it. There’s not much left to do, but it’s in that last 90% complete stage, where everytime you get to 99%, you find something else that needs done and pushes it back another week of real dev time.. and the Badgers is a side-hustle after all so time isn’t always available.

But here’s hoping it sneaks out before the year’s end.. it is looking rather good.

Loki

Tue, 18 Sep 2018 16:50:00 +0000

Loki passed away this Summer.

It was quite unexpected, as he was “the old boy” having been with us for six years! We were sure he’d outlast everyone as he just fought through everything. He had arthritis, which cost a bit in keeping him medicated every day.. but you’d do it for any person, so why not your pet? Still part of the family, just perhaps a bit furrier!

But yes.. six years as part of the family is a long time. He outlived his companion, Thor, as well as Ragnarok and Magni. He was piggy number one. He went through our original cage; where both him and Thor were free-range piggies, able to leap out and follow us as they pleased - raiding the salad drawer of the fridge when we opened it. He got the joy of the custom built CNC cage, along with loft with Thor. He got to meet Ragnarok, Cupid and Magni. He soaked us during bath times, by shaking and running around as no, he did not like it! He let his presence be known as we got in the door, and the wheeks for food and attention. He chewed the bars to bits to let everyone know that Loki was boss. He was Claire’s pig. A fact he made perfectly clear by just tolerating me, but scrabbling to her everytime he was picked up. He was a gamer pig - and routinely cuddled down with Claire for gaming goodness - and trying to help by “testing” the analogue sticks for tastiness. He was best pig.

There won’t ever be another like him. Six years of Loki. Six years of memories. Six years of showing us what a Guinea Pig can be, and certainly not going down without a fight.

He’ll be back with Thor, causing mischief along with Ragna and Magni. Eating all the parsley they can, and forever keeping a watchful eye on me, and a loving eye on Claire.

Loki Cuddles

Magni

Wed, 22 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

When Thor passed, Loki went into himself and that’s never good for a guinea pig. So, we quickly got him a new friend - Ragnarok - who sadly passed just a few days afterwards. Since we already knew that Loki had to have a cage mate, we went looking for another one; and somehow ended up with two. Cupid and Magni.

Magni was a rescue pig. His previous owners had given him up for adoption citing “lack of personality” though more likely, as he was a long haired piggy, was lack of effort on his owners. He was in need of a haircut and a bath when we got him; bathtime being something he came to love!

We had almost three years with him. Throughout that time we pretty much came to the conclusion he had a few things wrong with him. He was deaf, to begin with. When fireworks were let off, both Loki and Cupid would hide, whereas Magni would bounce about - obviously feeling the rumblings in the floor and enjoying that - and hearing nothing of the explosions. He may have also been partially sighted as he very much relied on sniffing your hand to know who you were. If you were feeding him, you had to make sure he sniffed your hand, or you’d give him a bit of a shock when he turned round and sensed your hand there. Finally, he likely had heart problems, as there would be occaisions of him “hooting” … though typically, would stop when we went to check on him.

Contrary to his adoption reason, he was full of character. Much like Thor, Magni did things in his own little way. He would pile up the hay and then proceed to dive through it, frequently being found in the morning underneath a large pile of it. Being a long hair, he needed a haircut every now and then… he wasn’t too pleased at this in the beginning, but grew to accept it - especially since he usually had a bath first. Of all our piggies, Magni was the only one that throughly enjoyed the bath. He’d even attempt to swim in the basin, all smiles and chirps.

We have no idea what happened to him. The night before he passed, we noticed he was making a strange sound and was drooling a lot - thinking he’d chipped a tooth from his over eager drinking from his bottle ( he never quite figured it out properly, and would always chew it to bits ) so were going to take him to the vets in the morning to see about getting it fixed. We cleaned him up and he got a bit of a blow dry - smiling all the time and loving the hot air as usual. Unfortunately, as morning came, he was hiding in his pigloo, and couldn’t move. When I picked him up, he felt so limp and fragile. While we rushed him to the vets as quick as we could, we had already known by that point there wasn’t anything that could be done. So we had to say our goodbyes.

For a guinea pig with a “lack of personality”, Magni did pretty well for himself. He had a few issues, but took them in his stride up to the very end. Always having a cheeky face, and sometimes being a bit of a mad possessed mop when needing a haircut. Whether his heart problems finally caught up with him, we don’t know. But he’s at peace now, and likely with Thor and Ragna, and having all the baths he wants.

Magni's Bathtime

That was 2016, that was!

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 19:30:00 +0000

Another year goes by, and not a huge amount done… Well, actually, I tell a lie. The Badgers actually released a couple of things!

First up is Sploosh! http://arcadebadgers.itch.io/sploosh This was done for the LowRezJam, and I went for a Gameboy like aesthetic. It placed relatively well, but I botched the controls up pretty well, so it didn’t get as much of a play as it perhaps deserves. Should probably have another look at this later, and fix up the controls.

Then there was Snake-A-Roid http://arcadebadgers.itch.io/snake-a-roid This was a Mini LudumDare entry, which was to mash-up a few different games to see how it worked. As you can guess, I went with Snake and Asteroids. It had no right working as well as it did, so I set about updating it and released a newer version ( for $1.50 ) with multiple arenas, couple of game modes, different controls, and more powerups. Still adding to it - I’ve plans for two more large updates, as well as porting to other platforms - so may bump the price up a bit.

I also attempted the 1bitjam.. had a good idea for it, and some design work laid out, but the quick turnaround and lack of time sadly killed it off. Still have the design stuff so would like to have another look in at it.

Also… GameMaker:Studio 2 launched! That took up quite a bit of time as of course, the day job comes first. But it’s more or less released now, and it’s just some finishing up work on it before final release ( we’re in Open Beta just now. ) Seems to be doing good though, and proud of the small part I’ve played in it!

What else? Oh yea.. illnesses… I gained a new one! Cluster Headaches! Though I suppose technically, I’ve always had them, just didn’t know what they were… now being medicated for them and they’ve not bothered me since. I also thought I’d avoided the seasonal flu… until it hit me a week before Christmas break, and is only now clearing up. Seems like it decided to go for my chest and sit in there. So hasn’t been the best of Christmas/New Year breaks in that regard. Stupid flu…

So, plan for this year. As always, try and make the Badgers self sufficient… this requires actually releasing things and making a bit more noise about it. Both of which I find difficult with time constraints, but will be giving it a damn good go as always. Main plan is to add two large patches to Snake-A-Roid this month. One adds a set of Bosses to the end of each arena - plus a boss run mode, naturally - and another adds yet another mode, in the vein of an “Arrange” or “Black Edition” - and stashes off the powerups until you explicitly use them. Certainly adds that strategic edge. After that, it’s porting to various other platforms.. likely Mac, Linux and Android to begin with, and go from there.

I’d also like to try and push out some other games - ideally one a month, starting from February, but we’ll see.

At any rate, here’s hoping 2017 has things settle down a bit.

Mid Year Madness

Tue, 14 Jun 2016 20:00:00 +0000

So, it’s the middle of 2016 already.

The original plan was to start pushing out quick games in January, focus on something more substantial in February, start a bigger project in March to carry through to May, then start over again with some prototypes, pick some to develop, etc…
That didn’t work.

But that’s just life.

Funnily enough, we’ve actually been relatively active recently.
While the original idea of quick prototypes, further develop then polish one didn’t quite come to plan, we have released two quick prototypes in the past couple of months.
Sploosh! - http://arcadebadgers.itch.io/sploosh
Snake-A-Roid http://arcadebadgers.itch.io/snake-a-roid or http://gamejolt.com/games/snake-a-roid/153761 if you want to show off on the leaderboards

Sploosh! was done for the Low Rez Jam, and runs at 64x64 upscaled to 512x512, and is a little homage to Scuba Dive on the Spectrum. I quite enjoyed it, and though I managed to make a mess of the controls ( it wasn’t obvious where you were swimming ) I’d like to return to it - or the idea of it - to develop further.
I worked on this on and off through two weeks, doing all the art, sound, music and code. Just what I needed to break my codeblock!

Then we did Snake-A-Roid.
This was quite quickly pushed together in a little over two days and just worked off the bat.
Ironically, I thought it was too hard to begin with so slowed it down - where some of the feedback stated it was easier than they expected - ho hum!
That said, this one worked out really well, so have taken it to stage two - adding extra features, various platform support, and general rounding out to take it to store for selling.
I have it running on Android, there’s leaderboard support in for various services, 360 pad support on Windows, new power-up/downs, difficulty levels, and customisable controls.
So yea, Snake-A-Roid is coming.. probably add DX or something to it so that the original one can stay free and playable.
I reckon I should have it ready for the end of the month, barring any new madness that life brings.

After Snake-A-Roid… there’s a couple of projects to look into.. as while January didn’t quite work out as planned, I did throw together a bunch of little prototypes to test things throughout the months.
These include such odd things as:
Grubs - a sortof gameified Marble Solitaire meets Bejeweled type thing.
Moons of Subterrane - a remake of an old Ludum Dare entry I did.
Munch Munch Munch - A mobile specific game that I can only describe as Hungry Hungry Hippos meets Guitar Hero.
Blast Zone - a Defender-esque thing.
Invade - a reverse space invaders that didn’t quite work out, but did spawn an idea of a Tactics style varient.
PowerOUT - a remake of another old project I did.
Shot To Ribbons - meant for the 1bit jam, but didn’t finish it.. wrote a chunk of the outline for it though, and would probably return to it.
Smoosh! - an endless vertical climber/runner thing.
Metal Boa - Snake vs Robotron, and amusingly started before I did Snake-A-Roid - which is Snake vs Asteroids.

So one of them is likely to be next.

Will see how I feel at the end of the month once Snake-A-Roid is released.

A look over 2015

Sun, 27 Dec 2015 20:00:00 +0000

Another difficult year gone by…

A year full of family passings and particularly nasty illnesses from all fronts meant no Badger work got done at all - and it’s looking very close to being shut down if I can’t turn fortunes around in the next month or so. The passing of my Mum had quite an effect on me, and have found it very difficult to concentrate on much beyond YoYo work. Hence why, for yet another year, this site is still not exactly completely functional and is missing images and files and all sorts. That said, I did manage to recover a number of source archives from backups, and immediately uploaded them to GitHub… which included the source for Plight of the Weedunks, SGZEngine and the aborted SGEngine. With another two family losses early in the year as well, however, my head just hasn’t been in the greatest of places.

As for illnesses… I got hospitalised with tonsilitis, had a second bout of vestibular neuronitis ( basically confirming that this will be a recurring pest I’ll have to live with, ) and have just finished a particularly nasty case of the flu - where the last one that was this bad had put me in hospital a few years ago. If I’m ill, I’m definitely ill! No minor ailments for me, sadly… Add to that and my daughter being finally diagnosed with “oral allergy syndrome” after about six months of wondering what on Earth was going on, and it’s certainly been an interesting year. It’s certainly fun to explain to a school why she can’t have fruit, soya or dairy ( her current triggers ) particularly when it’s all “Healthy Eating” initiatives. This knocked out the Summer holidays as a block of free time to do stuff in.

Also managed to rack up a bit more in the debt department due to playing the “what’s safe to eat” game.. but we’ll get that sorted.

Now then, 2016 is just round the corner and it’s going to be a bit of a bugger to start with. While the flu is more or less over with, I’ve still been left with a niggly cough that I can’t quite shift yet. And the Badgers are skint. There’s enough money scraped together to get it through another month and that’s it. As such, I have to get something released to try and get something in, or I will have no choice but to close it. This makes for a tricky situation as while I’d ordinarily do Badger work in my spare time I’m not quite able to do too much as, due to the flu, I was taken out most of December so have a lot of YoYo work to catch up on… So, I need some quick turn around games.. of which diving into the archives of design notes I have, there’s a couple that I can hopefully get done. Ideally, I’ll release a few “big” games next year - Tiny Critters ( finally! ) along with a new Germies! and perhaps a strategy game of some sort… be that Yargh! or derelict_ or something else.. there’s a few ideas kicking about at any rate. What I’d really like to do, is alternate between a couple of quick games, and a big one.. but that depends greatly upon what free time I can get. Tricky.

Oh well, life is life, let’s just get on with it.

Plight of the Weedunks

Mon, 19 Oct 2015 21:50:00 +0000

So I’ve just stuck up the (almost) entire source of Plight of the Weedunks to Github: http://github.com/stuckie/plightoftheweedunks. It’s missing the amBX code, but you don’t need that anyway… and the DLLs we had for it have long since expired.

Why put it up now?

Firstly, I lost it.

I only just found it while pouring over some backup archives, pulling together lost bits of projects - of which I’ve started and abandoned a huge amount of. Also, it’s got some rather interesting bits and pieces in there… it binds Horde3D, ODE and Lua together.. the vast amount of gameplay logic is written in Lua, and from what I remember, we actually tick the engine over from Lua as well. It also has some quite horrendous coding practices, before I settled on anything remotely readable… but shh…

Secondly, it’s important.

As I said, I lost it… and that’s quite a big chunk of code to lose, and especially something that maybe not culturally important, but it’s certainly important in my own programming history. It’s also quite old now, and not entirely useful to a lot of people these days, so hopefully I haven’t ruffled too many feathers over at Dare to be Digital as technically they likely still own the rights to it ( though I do believe our team leader was attempting to get them a while back, and the rest of us had agreed - me on provision of being able to release the code - but not sure how that went… ) Either way, the art assets are missing - I never had a copy of the source archive. The ones here are compiled and built for the game, so will be pretty difficult to use or modify for other things.

Anyway, some choice bits of the code to look at.

The Converter was modified slightly to pull in some more information that we were spitting out of Maya ( I don’t have the Maya bits we wrote - that was in the Art repository, which I never grabbed… ) Most useful bit being in https://github.com/stuckie/plightoftheweedunks/blob/master/ConverterSource/Source/Collada%20Converter/converter.cpp around lines 1038 - 1351 .. where I start spitting out Lua files for lights, cameras and chunks of level code. This helped immensely as it let our artists and level designer set where everything was in Maya, and we just picked it up on our end and started writing logic around it. It did however have the huge caveat that if the level changed, so too did all the scripts.. and that caught us out a few times until we started chunking up the logic better.

Other fun things are that all the ODE collision information got passed out to Lua. So when something collided, Lua was triggered to see what to do with it. Vast majority of the time it would be nothing, but we were able to trigger sounds ( or amBX effects! ) and bounce things off one another and so on. I’m still surprised how well it worked. Again, all of ODE was bound out.. if you check the level loading scripts ( we’ll take Toothy as an example; https://github.com/stuckie/plightoftheweedunks/blob/master/source/data/scripts/levels/toothy/physics/static/toothy.physics.static.lua ) they’re all split into scripted, dynamic and static. We then just call ODE to bind the dimensions out properly… most of which got spat out by the converter.

We also effectively bound out all of Horde3D to Lua as well, so we were able to poke at the rendering pipeline from within Lua. For example, https://github.com/stuckie/plightoftheweedunks/blob/master/source/data/scripts/misc/engineSetup.lua actually sets up the resource paths for Horde3D, and I vaguely remember Lachlan doing some crazy shader stuff at some point through Lua as well, before we dropped the HDR pipeline completely.

It certainly has got me thinking about crazy projects to try with GameMaker…

I’ve been unearthing lots of old projects while digging around archives, so I’ll be trying to get them up on GitHub as well. It would be a shame to lose them entirely, as almost happened here!

Windows 10 (Nightmare Edition)

Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Perhaps installing Windows 10 while being ill was not the best plan… Not only that, but on a machine which Windows 8 didn’t like to install on ( the tech previews installed happily, but the final retail did not, curiously ) However, sometimes a distraction can prove welcome, and Windows 7 was getting rather slow and clogged, so a reinstall seemed a good idea.

I’d already upgraded a couple of machines to Windows 10 without issue, and they did run faster… so thought that maybe this time, it’d be plain sailing. Nope. Straight after first reboot, it complained that something bad had happened, and to insert the install media and try again.

Great.

Ok.. so installing from scratch may not work, but I can upgrade from a Windows 7 install… so I reinstalled 7, and tried that way. This time, it didn’t even tell me it had failed with a nice error box, it just decided “nope, failed, so let’s revert back to 7, whether you want to or not” So that’s a bust.

After having a quick look about, it seems there could be a few issues… 1) Drive formatted as MBR instead of GPT - so I fixed that, reinstalled, and nope… 2) USB devices acting funny - so I unplugged them all, reinstalled, and still nope…

But, I did come across an article that if there’s a hardware incompatibility - due to missing drivers on the disc - it can do what I’m seeing. My machine is rather old.. it’s an Asus M2N-E SLI motherboard, 8gig ram, GeForce 550 Ti GTX ( or somewhere there abouts) and an AMD 9850 X4 Phenom Black Edition processor. It’s had all manner of Linux installed on it.. it’s even had Mac OS X on it for a giggle while fiddling about.. and has been happily running Windows through XP, Vista and 7. Surely a hardware conflict would’ve raised it’s head by now? Either way, I followed the instructions, which consisted of bringing up the Command Prompt (Shift + F10) when the “something bad” message appears. Calling up regedit, then finding HKLocal machine/SYSTEM/SETUP/STATUS/ChildCompletion and setting setup.exe from 1 to 3. This worked, and install continued happily… until the next issue…

Almost constant rebooting for apparently no reason once I got to the desktop.

One of the issues that could’ve been halting install was USB wifi, so I removed that and it seemed a bit more stable.. so off I went to get the driver on another machine, onto a usb stick, and install that way. I did the same with the nVidia graphics drivers too, as that was another hiccup I had seen regularly - borked graphics drivers. And it did seem slightly more stable. Until it started installing updates… and the reboot-loop began again. This seemed to be caused by a somewhat wonky update, so I removed the USB wifi again, and poked in the registry, finding HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList and deleting any with a ProfileImagePath. And that seemed to behave itself again.. so I stupidly turned the machine off for the night after a day of wrestling with it.

That was a fun mistake.

On booting in the morning, it crashed while logging in and rebooted. Only now, it’s pretty adament I have the wrong password - even after changing it online. So.. back to the recovery command prompt. A run of chkdsk D: /F /R/ X ( to make sure it tried something ) took a few hours and … nothing. Attempted to jump to the last restore point before the update and… computer says no. So.. it’s stable at least, but I can’t login and use it. I can’t boot to the recovery console on the install itself, as it wants me to login… so I can’t add a new user, or activate the Admin user. I can’t use the recovery shell from the install disc to add a new user, as the net service talks to the recovery environment and not the actual install on disk.

I have been fiddling with computers from a young age - which I blame my parents on for encouraging me. I’ve installed Slackware 8.1 from floppies onto a 486. I’ve installed Mandrake and SuSE when nVidia just started pushing out binary drivers, and the madness that caused in system stability trying to use them. I even got my printer and scanner working under Mandriva! I’ve compiled Gentoo on an AMD Duron 1200 with a gig of ram just to see how it all worked. I’ve built embedded Linux systems with Debian and LFS. I’ve created cross-compiling toolchains between ARM, MIPS, x86, and x64. I’ve even built runnable Windows software under Linux via WINEGCC.

All of these have been fun projects as I wanted to fiddle with them. Never have I come up against a piece of commercial software - especially such a vital part of a computer’s software infrastructure - that I’ve had to do such ridiculous hoop jumping just to get the bloody thing to work! And it still doesn’t!

It runs fine on the laptop I recently upgraded from 8->8.1->10. It runs very well on the media centre I upgraded from 7->10. It’ll likely run fine on the two netbooks I have, and another one of the laptops ( if I can get it’s graphics chipset fixed, anyway ) But my main desktop? Nope. Not having that. Which makes me somewhat wary of letting it go near the Badgers work laptop as I can’t really have that explode on me the way my desktop has.. it needs to stay running for those precious few minutes I can find to work on things. As life is.. well.. life.. it gets in the way of everything… For instance, this site is waay behind schedule of being sorted out.. The Badgers site at least runs, but I’ve not been able to do anything Badger related for about a year now… short of some patch work, and filing paperwork for the accountant to play with. I can’t afford time to muck about with OS installs that go haywire anymore.. I need something that works, and funnily enough Windows just doesn’t make sense anymore; Linux does.

I’ll have another fiddle tonight with Windows 10, to see if I can get it to stick. But odds aren’t looking good for it, and I might be back to fully Linux.

Good thing Debian 8.2 just got released, then!

We've moved again!

Tue, 10 Mar 2015 22:15:06 +0000

So, let’s see if this thing works at all…

I’m getting a bit fed up with the server going down a lot recently.. which seems to be Wordpress’ bulkiness just being that bit much for the (in all honesty, aging) server. So lets start migrating away from it as best we can.

First up, bye bye Wordpress, and hello Jekyll. Jekyll is a static site generator… feed it some stuff and it’ll spit out html based on templates and things. Nifty. I was just using Wordpress to basically log in, type some stuff, and leave it alone for a while… I stripped out Apache, stuffed in nginx, and various caching things to make it all run faster as the generation time for the pages was getting a bit much.. now, it’s all static. There’s no reason for it not to be static, and technically never was, so yay! Bye bye Mysql as well! Of course, I still need to edit the posts and create new ones.. so, let’s move the site over to github, and host it from there, with images elsewhere.

No, seriously.

The blog is now on Github.

Not everything has been sorted out yet, and this likely won’t be live on the main domain for a bit, but those who poke about will at least see this and understand what I’ve done and why.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed using Wordpress.. but it’s a bit overkill for me to type stuff now and then, and have it constantly regenerate pages for little reason. Just eating processor time for the sake of it, really.

The Badgers site will be moving to Jekyll as well, and probably the same setup, but that’ll take a wee bit longer to sort out.

2014 in review

Tue, 30 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The past year has not been kind.

The losing of pets and family, school incidents, car damage, and fights with the council for new housing have quite drastically taken their toll to the point that this Christmas just hasn’t had that Christmassy feeling to it at all.

Business-wise, it wasn’t too bad… the Badgers finished a two-part contract that helped pay for a devkit… and to reimburse myself with the credit put in to the business to help pay for my Mum…
We also released Grim!
Not that it did very well, but small starts and all that.
Incidentally, Grim is now free, so if you haven’t got it yet, go grab it from itch or desura.

I’m also somehow still employed at YoYo Games – even with the being in-and-out of the office most of the year to deal with the various disasters and incidents that have unfolded. I have nothing but thanks and respect for them in allowing me to deal with everything. I do, of course, make up the time lost by working from home any way I can… it’s only right, after all.

Thankfully there is but one more day before 2015 arrives.

What will 2015 bring?

New EU VAT laws for certain.. which has put a hold on my plans to sell directly from the Badgers’ site and build up a community. That wasn’t expected. It’s also the reason why Grim is now free, as I just can’t be bothered to deal with it all just now. I’ve more important things on my mind, than scouring for new VAT compliance measures. However, it looks like the standard of going through a well established portal is going to be the best option.

Hopefully another game or two from the Badgers.
Don’t know what the next one will be at the moment, as the choice is amongst four.. but I’m planning on doing some tests in January to see what comes out best.
One game I absolutely must do, is the remake/sequel of Germies. My Mum played that a lot, and still sits on the top of one of the leaderboards. I can’t not dedicate the next version to her memory. It would feel wrong. I also need to get it on the Wii U somehow, as she would have loved that.

Hopefully a new house as well.
Currently we feel very cramped in our pokey little flat. While the council are adamant that “Children under 10 can share the same room” .. we’d like them to think about the horrors we’ve gone through that we’ve had to give them their separate rooms, and squish our bed into the living room. It seems to fall on deaf ears though, so will just have to start siphoning off a deposit from the wages. Might take all year to build one up, but that’ll just have to do.

And finally, better health.
I’ve had enough with illnesses and things this year.
I’d like to wish better health for everyone.