Category: Uncategorized

I’m moving house Monday. Good timing eh? Actually not.  It comes between the launch of GSB, my birthday and another thing…

Anyway, I’ve lived here ten years, and it’s time to empty the attic. Stuff that got put in the attic got put there because it was irrelevant ten year ago, so it’s ooolllddddd. (like me). but it’s pretty funny finding old stuff I had ages back. I found a keyboard layout, carefully hand written for an old game, which I was confused about until I saw that C mapped to Luxor and V mapped to Morkin…

Amongst the fun was a suiprisingly huge collection of LPs. That’s what we caleld mp3 playlists back before you were born. I’ve given most of them to a charity shop. My need to treasure a Prince LP or the beach boys greatest hits is now behind me. Anyway, I’m keeping my collection of old heavy metal picture discs and a few other classics. Here are some of the memorable ones.

Plus there is always the star wars stuff. (click either pic to enlarge BTW). Here’s some of the rare stuff. You might think you outgeek me with your collection of Episode II memorabilia, but gaze upon my George Lucas autograph (just one page in my book) with envy. Also check out the compliments slip from Elstree.  1,000 geek points if you can work out why it’s especially collectible and unusual. Also check out darth vaders autograph, and a picture of me aged 13ish outside the first UK showing of Return of the Jedi at bottom right. Ah memories…

The other thing?

GSB will be on steam from 16th November :D Yay!

I can’t be the only WW2 obsessed geek here? Anyway, I visited the huge Bovington tank Museum a few days ago (I was away a day, hence not much blogging).

Anyway, here are some gratuitous pics of the real life versions of tanks you normally see only in Company Of Heroes:

Treyarch Glider Tank

German Hetzer:

German Goliath (pesky things)

Tiger, with dorky indie developer to show scale

Ok, this isn’t game related…

I’m moving house soon, and it’s my birthday soon, and this all conflicts with the whole ‘releasing gratuitous space battles’ thing as well, so its’ going to be an insane few weeks. The stress of both getting older AND releasing my new game AND moving house is all quite high, but it all pales into insignificance next to this:

Her name is Jadzia, and she is one of two cats we have. At an appointed time, with little margin for error, I need to stick her in a cat box, and drive hundreds of miles to the new house. She is likely to ‘resist’ this.

Jadzia has not been to the vets in years, because we just cannot put her in a box. She fights BADLY. She is normally fine, you can stroke her, and even pick her up for maybe one or two seconds at most. she will sit on your lap for hours, but she hates being put into a box, she has claws like wolverine, and she knows how to use them. She is very very aware of people ‘planning’ things, she moves like lightning and she picks up on the slightest unusual thing.

Tell me your tips, especially if you have a similar cat. Things we have tried:

1) Locking the cat flaps and trapping her in a room first. No joy, she will break through a locked cat flap by force, and chasing her around the room tires us before tiring her.  We are considering using paving slabs to effectively brick up the cat flaps.

2) leaving an open cat box next to her food so she isn’t scared of it. This works, she’s not scared of its presence, but knows when she’s going into it. She will not eat food if you place the bowl in there. She is that clever.

Everyone suggests wrapping her in a towel, which sounds easy, but I bet it isn’t. I’m also wary of suffocating her. My heart rate actually goes up when I even think about this, because it brings back flashbacks to ‘nam from when I’ve tried before. I’ve lost a fair amount of blood doing it in the past. A friend of mine offered to lend me his welding gauntlets, but I suspect that might tip her off. The vet says there is no safe sedative for a cat that isn’t given by injection.

If I could find a way to record my attempt on a webcam for everyone’s amusement I would, but I doubt that’ll happen.

Many people on the interwebs get very upset that george Lucas uses a lot of transition effects in his films. They may be tacky, heck, they may even be ‘gratuitous’ but I always identify them with star wars, and thus SPACE BATTLES. So how could I not put them in the game? (I’m actually quite pleased with how it looks).

On an unrelated note, those nice people at EliteBastards (yes really), have done a writeup of the game:

Elitebastards.com

I might have some interesting news soon, BTW.

Fellow indies dejobaan recently did a video reponse to questions about their game, and I thought this was a great idea and shamelessly copied it replying to all the stuff people ask me by email and on the forums, then spent far too much time today playing with sony vegas movie editor. I needed to get my moneysworth didn’t I? For some reason I started ranting about star trek: