Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Some thoughts after visiting China

Posted on May 22, 2026

I was woken today at 6.20AM, so you get to hear my thoughts on a 2 week trip to China before breakfast. First, where did I go? It was a 2 week trip starting in Hong Kong, then flying to Beijing, then a train to Xian, then a flight to ZhangJiaJie, then a flight to Shanghai, then home. Yes, multiple flights, I know. I offset everything, and took the train for the one trip where it was viable. Anyway, here is my experience!

Hong Kong!

…was amazing and cool, but at the end of the holiday it became clear that Hong Kong is massively like the west in comparison to the rest of China (still). It reminded me more of South Korea than the rest of China. Its also a fairly ‘low-key’ city. I thought the skyline was impressive, and we went out on an old Chinese fishing boat on the river to see it (which was probably the highlight of that city for me), but later having gone to Shanghai, Hong Kong was ‘meh’. However it was a good place to start, to get used to using the payment system everyone uses (alipay), the food, and the rarity of people who speak any English.

Beijing!

Beijing is FLAT and has a lot of trees. Two things nobody expected! They seem to deliberately limit high-rise building. And there are a lot of tree-lined streets, even really major ones. This was our first encounter with electric cars in China. OH MY GOD. They are EVERYWHERE, and I would guess 99% of the motorbikes are electric. Its so amazing. Super-busy intersections are both quiet and pollution free. Our guide told us charging-points are everywhere and electricity is super cheap. And no, he really didn’t seem to be a communist party agent! Most of our guides had worked or lived in the west at some point.

The highlight of Beijing has to be the forbidden city. It is HUGE and also amazing. Imagine something like Buckingham Palace in the UK, but about 20x the scale. And its a super popular tourist spot with the Chinese. This was another shock. Really very few western tourists. It felt like 90% internal Chinese Tourism.

We also took a day-trip to see the great wall of China. Its pretty incredible. While we were there we saw a helicopter zipping around, asked the guide, and he said it was £300 for 10 minutes. I am NOT going to return to the great wall in my lifetime, so that seemed like a no-brainer. I love helicopters :D. So we did it. I’ve done a lot of helicopter trips on holidays. I have NEVER had one booked and arranged so casually. No 30 minute ‘safety briefing’ here. Just write down your weight, tick a box and jump in!

It sounds like an indulgent luxury thing, but I massively recommend it. You see the wall in a totally different way, including bits that are not accessible and overgrown with plants. It was incredibly cool.

Xian!

We took an eight hour high speed train to Xian. This was pretty good, and it was how we saw ‘rural’ China. SUPER FLAT for the whole trip (although I assume the train is routed that way for this reason), and oh my god the number of wind turbines was insane. I can assure you Trump is wrong. The Chinese love wind farms. Also we zipped past a LOT of farmland on that trip.

Xian is visited mainly for the terracotta warriors which are very impressive, and presented in a way that the scale is vast, like everything in China. On the way to the site, we zipped along a motorway past dozens if not hundreds of huge apartment blocks and skyscrapers, as our (second) guide casually mentioned that this was farmland five years ago! They literally build a city in five years. Its staggering…

I am very pleased with that photo. Check out the people at the sides to get the scale. It helps that I am a foot taller than the average Chinese tourist.

Also we had another insanely good Xian experience. On a guide’s recommendation, we went to the ‘local show’. We expected a normal theatrical performance. But no… its China. So this one hour theater/acrobat/dance performance had six distinct scenes. In the west, we would pause, maybe lower a curtain, and stage-hands would shuffle the scenery. HA! In China they build SIX massive stages around the theater (which held about 3,000 seats I think), and then rotate the ENTIRE BUILDING around the six stages, so there are no gaps. Yup. Just build an entire theater on a turntable. Simple. Also the show was amazing…

Oh and the show had a ton of people in it, and live animals, dogs and camels and so-on, and incredible acrobatics. The tickets were cheap and it was not full.

ZhangJaiJae!

This is my new favorite place on Earth. I simply cannot possible describe it in words, I could paste a hundred pictures here. Its basically ‘pandora’ from avatar (and the inspiration for the movie). It is STAGGERING. Its like some artist took the Grand Canyon in the US, made it ten times larger, filled it with tropical plants, and then installed glass bridges, cable cars and lifts to make it possible to view all of it from a hundred different places. If you think China is all tower blocks and concrete go here. Its amazing. It also has the worlds second-largest glass bridge (the other one is also in china). I am VERY scared of heights, but crossed it twice!

Like anywhere truly amazing you cannot really capture it in photos. Just go there. If you go nowhere else in China, go here.

Also we went on an insanely good cable car. Why be like boring westerners who would build a cable car from the base of a mountain to the top? Just build a cable car from the city center right to the mountain top, and have it trundle over half the city! Because China… Also we went to the 999 steps to the gate to heaven. But I am not super-fit, so we took the series of NINE escalators in tunnels bored into tunnels in the rock that take you to the top. Again, because… China.

Shanghai!

I was VERY sorry to leave, but next up was Shanghai. Wow. If you have been to a place that feels more like Blade Runner, I would be surprised. They do love their high rise skyscrapers here. This was another city massively into Electric Cars, and a city with a ton of variety. We saw parks with retired people doing Tai-Chi and playing jazz and dancing. We saw an amazing night food market, we went to some brilliant shopping areas, saw some incredible historic buildings, and crazy skyscrapers. This was taken from my hotel room 17 floors up.

I bought a cool watch from the shanghai watch company! We mingled with all the trendy young Chinese people (95% women) dressed up in traditional Tang-Dynasty outfits. It was amazing. And like everywhere we went, it seemed 100% safe, 100% clean. No litter, no graffiti, no homeless people, no begging. You can be cynical about this, but I think the west over-do that cynicism. Anyway I preferred shanghai to Hong Kong.

Thoughts!

99% of what you read in the west about China is BOLLOCKS. We talk about Chinese state propaganda, but its got nothing on the hatchet job the west continues to attempt on China to distract from our own problems. Actually going there is amazing, but also depressing, because you see just how much we are being lied to. We had 4 different guides, so we didn’t get just one perspective. They all worked for private companies. Don’t believe conspiracy bullshit about them being ‘party’ appointed. Our first guide was especially relaxed and frank about what is good in China, and not so good. They make it hard to get a job in a city you were not born in, (in some cases). Another guide admitted he had one child because of the one-child policy (not in place now), and you could tell he was a bit sad about that. He also pointed out that there were real ‘ghost cities’ where too much housing got built.

Too Much Housing

This is the thing. China has its problems for sure, and its NOT a place for the privacy minded. In 15 days I reckon my passport was scanned 60 times and my face scanned each time too. On the flipside, we saw zero litter, zero crime, zero graffiti, and a lot of police in busy public places. To be fair the police seemed fairly chill, and some traffic laws get casually ignored by people on scooters. But anyway let me return to… Too Much Housing.

I am a lucky middle-aged man in the UK who owns his house outright. But young people in the west are kinda *fucked*. House prices are insane and unaffordable. Now to be fair house prices in trendy bits of shanghai are no different to central London, but in general, everything seems CHEAP in China. They have just built so much infrastructure its insane. There was a maglev train from the airport to city-center in Shanghai that goes 300kph, took 8 minutes and cost peanuts. All public transport is ludicrously cheap. Food is roughly a third of the price in the UK. And the public transport is modern, fast and high spec. And the provision for electric cars… oh my god. They are the DEFAULT in many cities. Not just of new cars, of ALL cars on the road. Its wonderful.

When I got home to the UK, I made my regular weekly drive to Bristol. For the last 6 months there has been ‘road widening’ on a stretch of an A-road, maybe 2 miles long (at most). Its still not finished. If you had told me all work had been paused for the 2 weeks I was away I would believe it. We spend BILLIONS on trivial infrastructure that takes decades and progresses at a snail’s pace. China builds fast and dramatically and at huge scale. My local road widening would be at most a week’s work in China, not six months. It is *embarrassing* how both technologically behind the west is, and how useless we are at construction.

Anyway, don’t take my word for it. Search youtube for China impressions from US tourists. They are always similar. Its amazing. Do not believe any western media bullshit about China. And do not listen to anyone who has not been there in the last five years. This is a staggering country that is accelerating away from the west so fast we cannot comprehend it. And go there! Especially ZhangJaiJae!

Solar-Powered Borehole Opening Ceremony!

Posted on May 20, 2026

So our solar-powered borehole in Cameroon is now live and working and providing clean drinking water at zero effort to hundreds of people. Yay! There are more details about the borehole here, here and also here. I might not have mentioned it before, but the cost is just over £20k. Very worthwhile when you think about how many people it will affect and the changes and improvements it enables. Anyway, they sent a very nice video celebrating the opening of the borehole, and here it is :D.

Solar-Borehole project update!

Posted on May 2, 2026

Just got an update from SHUMAS, the organisation on the ground in Cameroon that helps us do those charity things, like the two schools. Looks like things are going well. Hopefully lots of pics and updates to come!

Ridiculous Stats Battles

Posted on April 16, 2026

A while ago I re-designed the post-battle stats screen for Ridiculous Space Battles. I was MUCH happier with this than the earlier versions and I loved the horizontal histograms for every weapon which showed not just how much damage they did, but how much was reflected or absorbed by each of hull, armour and shields. I think it was a vast improvement on what I had previously. However! there was much room for improvement.

The biggest issue was that the list of stats chosen didn’t seem to be that helpful. If your fleet was 95% frigates, why bore you with the ‘best’ cruiser and fighter weapons? I re-designed the system to show you more interesting key stats such as the most cost-effective weapon, the ship that was hardest to damage (toughest?) and the weapons that were in use the most (or least). These stats are way more helpful:

Although that was a big improvement, play-testing showed me that a key problem still remained (which is true of all auto-batllers), which was namely ‘How can I translate what I learn from all these stats into adjusting my deployment the next time I fight this battle? This is a big problem (and it was back in the Gratuitous Space Battles days), and I have experimented a lot and come up with a solution I am super happy with!

In hindsight, the solution is obvious. Give the player a way to view want went wrong last time, when they try the level again. In code terms, this was a ton of work, but it works!

So when a battle ends, after viewing the current stats (probably best thought of as stats-highlights now), if you then want to try the level again you have a togglable overlay over the deployment map which shows the fleet you tried last time, with a ton of stats for every single squadron showing how they did.

The coloured squares and the percentages show survival rates for each squad, and you get Survived/Escaped/Destroyed percentages as a tooltip, but click on any squad to see a pop-up with a bunch more stats, tabbed into defensive and offensive data.

And at any point you can use a hotkey (or the buttons at the top of the screen) to toggle from this ‘previous battle overlay’ to your placed deployment for your next attempt at a battle. This makes it SO MUCH EASIER to look at your deployment and work out what went wrong and why, and correct it for the next battle. It is also persistent saved-to-disk data, so you can come back to a failed mission months later and still see the battle stats from your last attempt.

I know the games development keeps taking longer and longer but its definitely getting to be a lot better as a result, and I would rather ship a great game late than a not-as-great game on time. Thanks for your patience, and for following its development! Since I took that screenshot, I have had a MUCH better idea for how to make that screen even better, and I’m working on that now. This means even more work, but its going to be awesome.

We got a heat pump (at last)

Posted on March 28, 2026

It was inevitable really. I’m a life-long environmentalist who got solar panels 15 years ago, an EV 11 years ago, and a battery a few years ago. I also spent my own money to madly build a 1.23MWP solar farm. Of course I was going to get a heat pump. In fact you may well have assumed I already had one. Why was I not earlier to this?

We live in a very old house. Its funny because where I live, its just considered an ‘old’ house, because there are so many here, but by most people’s standards its ludicrously old, as it was built in 1750. Living in a house like this is kinda awesome, if you like BBC costume dramas, and it certainly has a lot of ‘character’, but there are definite drawbacks. One is that it is quite cold, as the walls are single-thickness, without cavities, and the other is that you need government permission to change anything.

When heat pumps first came out, there was definitely a vibe o ‘well its cool if you have a passivehaus’ and then things migrated to be ‘its great as long as you have underfloor heating and excellent insulation’. This was still no good to us, as our floors are either suspended wood over a cellar, or brick and huge chunks of stone. Underfloor heating would never be a thing here. But then heat pumps got better and better, and we managed to (finally) get double glazing, and it actually looked like getting a heat pump might work for us.

Quotes and Grants

Luckily a neighbour of ours already had one, so we went and gawped at it, and asked questions etc. (They have a newer house). Eventually we decided to go for it, and got quotes. Oh my god the quotes. First we needed to get an ‘Energy performance certificate’ for our house, which basically means pay £100 to some freshly qualified surveyor who walks around your house and fills out a form. Like many govt programs, this was a big waste of time, because although you need the certificate, the govt dropped any limit on how efficient the house had to be before getting a grant for a heat pump. The certificate is thus just a piece of paper that gets stuck in a drawer that was pointless, but we had to do it anyway.

Why did we need it? Well because the UK government, for all its sins gives you £7,500 towards a heat pump, and that certificate process is the only string attached. So well worth it. Why did they drop the efficiency limit? Well someone in govt finally worked out that the only people getting heat pumps installed were retired middle class people who tended to live in old houses. If the efficiency limit was too strict, they wouldn’t bother, and they need ‘early-adopters’ like us to kick-start uptake of heat pumps. Getting the grant was satisfying because I have NEVER got a grant from the govt to do anything (not even the solar farm).

Anyway, grant plus paperwork in place, we got three companies to give us heat pump quotes. One was just totally useless. Another did an exhaustive heat-loss survey, but all of the numbers were blatantly just wrong. We eventually went with a third (which our neighbours used), and they were tons better. Basically they need to come measure your rooms, look at your radiators, do a ton of calculations and decide what size heat pump you need, and if you need to upgrade radiators. We were told we needed a 14KW heat pump, and no urgent radiator upgrades. In the end we doubled the size of two of them anyway, in rooms that were always cold.

We then needed ‘listed building consent’ and ‘planning permission’, and that was an epic world of stupid stupid pedantic pointless government bureaucracy bullshit I won’t bore you with, because unless your house is listed, you wont need it.

The Installation

And so it came to pass that people came and installed a heat pump. Yay. Because we had previously had an outside oil combi-boiler, our house had zero hot or cold water tanks. So we needed one of those. And luckily, it went in our cellar, which is where we put stuff like batteries etc. This was awesome as it meant taking up zero room in the house. I was impressed that the installers were not put off by having to install a hot water tank and ton of heating controls down some tiny steps in a cellar, especially as the door to the cellar is actually a secret door that works as a bookcase. Its all very scooby do.

Anyway, after a few days of fuss, we ended up with this!

And if you think ‘seriously thats a lot of tubing’ I agree with you. I had it all explained to me, but I zoned out a bit. It looks more complex than it is, and you can basically ignore it all and just use a tiny little remote thermostat gadget to control it all that looks like this:

And of course the actual heat pump got installed (which was way quicker) and the old boiler removed. It went in the exact same place and is here:

I should point out this is a BIG heat pump for a 1750s 3 bedroom detached house. If you have an average UK terraced house a heat pump would be 5-8kw. Ours is 14kw. Also worth pointing out that although the total cost for our heat pump massively exceeded the £7.5k grant, that would be VERY different for a typical smaller one, especially if you already have a hot water tank and don’t need it installed somewhere awkward.

So the heat pump was installed, and everything was great. The end.

The difficulties and the fix

But no! It was an irritating nightmare of unhappiness for a few weeks. We had major problems. Firstly it seemed like it used a TON of electricity to do NOTHING. It then seemed that it COULD generate hot water (and lots of it), or hot radiators, but never under our control. It was frustrating and disappointing and I was unhappy :(. We argued and complained a bit. We also decided to double the size of one of the two radiators in our living room. This was a good move and made a big difference, BUT what totally transformed everything was the radiator dude spotting that the ‘Hysteresis’ was set wrong. This is a setting that determines how much the heat pump lets temperatures diverge from the thermostat before switching. Heat pumps do NOT like to be constantly going on and off. Insanely ours was set to 20 degrees, when it should have been 8 or even less. So our heat pump would be told to get the radiators to say 50 degrees, do it, then switch off and not care about switching back until they were 40. The same happened with hot water. It also controls how much you can overshoot, so a Hysteresis of 20 means radiators oscillated from 40 to 60.

In practice what this meant is that it all felt RANDOM. Sometimes radiators were super hot, often seemingly cold. Ditto hot water. It felt like the whole system was under someone else’s control. It sucked. We had heat-pump-purchase regret. But actually the minute that setting got changed, everything then worked perfectly, and we are very happy. The house is warmer than ever.

Its worth pointing out we had several conversations with the installer, lots of emails and frustration before eventually it was spotted that this was wrong. We are so glad that we persevered to make sure it was set up correctly, instead of just being grumpy and mumbling that ‘heat pumps suck’ which I think some people do when they have this problem. Check your settings!

The conclusions

So… was it a good idea? Well actually YES. If you read my blog you know I would do it anyway. Its about the environment for me, not money. I HATED buying thousands of litres of oil to heat our house, and wanted to remove my last direct usage of fossil fuels. But actually now its all set up right and we have the right radiators, its pretty good. And our timing was comically good. Not only was our oil tank 99% empty when they took the old boiler away (luck!), but just as we are settling in to our oil-free lifestyle, the Iran war starts and the price of heating oil has more than DOUBLED. Our electricity bill is definitely a lot higher, but then we now have zero oil bill. Plus we had the heat pump fitted in winter, so it was always going to be the most expensive time to assess how much power we now used.

So, my tips for anybody considering it? Firstly I would say shop-around and read reviews. Some installers are good, some not. Same as anything. Ask neighbours who have had one fitted for references. Secondly, take any recommendations about new radiators seriously. We were a bit flippant. We should have got that radiator fitted at the same time. Thirdly, Make sure its set up right. They are COMPLEX and you need it set up right for your lifestyle and your home.

But generally, I am very happy. Out of solar, batteries, EV and heat pump, this was the most disruptive and hardest upgrade. However if you are in the UK don’t delay. That govt £7,500 grant will NOT be around forever. Take advantage of it. Oh and if you are thinking of getting solar or a battery, GET LOTS. We have gone from smugness about our 4.1kwp solar and 19kwh batteries to ‘Balls, I wish we had more…’. A heat pump does push up how much electricity you use, so generating more and storing more off-peak power will be well worth it.