Flavius Alecu

I’ve been really busy lately. When I’m not working late I’m always coding something in the evenings. I’ve started to learn quite a bit about the Cell processor, since the beautiful PS3 devkits are idle in the office after work, and I’ve even started to learn some UnrealScript.

I don’t know why but I’ve never really been into modding. I’ve always wanted to code my games from scratch but I always failed to finish projects either because it was too much work to code the engine before the game or because I didn’t have the assets I needed for my game. To be fair I never really attempted to make any FPS games or the like, but still. You don’t really have those problems when making mods, depending on what kind of mod you’re making of course.

Recently I started helping out some friends with a mod they’ve started. Unfortunately they are all artists and not programmers so I thought I could give them a hand. They are all extremely talentful and the mod is already looking great. I just started a week or so ago so there’s not much to show yet but we might have a video or two to show very soon. The mod is called Airborn and you can read more about it at our Mod DB page. You can also see who made these fantastic screens there.

Last Friday we played the yearly Microsoft 5 a side football tournament in London. It was great fun, especially since we dominated everyone. Well, at least we dominated for a few minutes before the other team started to score goals. But next year we’ll win, just wait for it. Head over to our Flickr site and see some wicked pictures of the SD team in action.

Right, here’s my entry to the competition and what I’d like to call version 1.0. I really want to add some new things to it, an end boss and some sounds, but I need a break. I haven’t been able to code this during week days so I did some long coding days the last two weekends. Now I just need to get away from this project.

You need XNA 2.0 and to run the game. There are links to everything you need in the readme file. Download the game from the Games page.

It’s been dead around here for a while since I’ve been busy with starting my new life in London and all. But I’m back on track with my small projects and I’ve got some new stuff to put up.

I’ve always wanted to make my own top down shooter so I started hanging out on www.shmup-dev.com. I’ve also started on a small shmup but that has to wait because shmup-dev.com just started a small competition involving rapid prototyping. The idea is to create fast prototypes with new designs instead of complete games and with weird and restrictive rules the end results will hopefully introduce some new concepts to the genre. The rule for this first session was simple: the player is not allowed to fire his own bullets. The prototype of course needs meaningful gameplay as well, just so we don’t end up with a bunch of “dodge the bullet” games.

So I’ve started on my project about a week ago and I’ve managed to create some interesting new stuff, at least for me. I didn’t really have a full design doc before I started coding , it was interesting to see how the game evolved while I was trying different stuff. I’ll post some more info in a day or two but to wet your appetite, here’s a short video.

So I just came home from Tristan’s going away dinner. It’s been a great evening and everyone seemed to have a great time, even though Tristan is leaving Splash Damage and moving to Finland. I’ve only known Tristan for a short period of time but he’s been great to get to know and I enjoyed his company. I hope he has a great time in Finland and that we’ll get to meet again.

On a side note, we’ve started blogging on the company website and it’s worth checking out. The blog is still young but it will soon fill up with a bunch of fun stuff to read so why not have a look.  Newest thing up is an interview with Tim ’spacemonkey’ Appelby. Check it out here.