Code

Coding & Projects
I'm not sure if anyone's particularly interested, but I've worked on a variety of computer projects over the years, both at work and at home, and I thought it might be interesting to share some of them here with maybe some details of the more interesting aspects of their creation. As a result, see below for links to either the applications themselves (home projects) or screenshots and development details (work projects).

2008 Vektrax (iPhone) (Work Project)

"Personally, I liked the whole "racing down a tube idea", but I really wanted to make the tube split apart so you could find yourself racing on a flat plane or even folding back further so you found yourself on the outside of a tube..."
(Click the link above for more details)

Submitted BGG computational artwork (Home Project)

I joined BGG at the end of 2007 and wanted to find some contribution I could make to the site. As I'll mention again below, I'm a bit of a fan of computational artwork and so, given I'm not a great photographer and don't own a huge number of rare boardgames for which I could contribute new and interesting data, I figured some board-game inspired artwork contributions might be appreciated. The first is based on the game Tri-Ominos and inspired by M. C. Escher's circle limit series, and the second is a stereogram based on the tiles and player pieces used in the board game Carcassonne - the former seemed to have been received better than the latter (although the Carc. image did result in me actually creating a commission piece of art as a birthday gift for someone's wife - an unusual kind of request for a programmer like myself to receive), but it was interesting writing the computer programs to create both of them.

2007 to 2008 Bedrock (Windows / Mac / Linux) (Work Project) (!PAGE NOT WRITTEN YET!)

"..."
(Click the link above for more details)

2006 Gravity (Win32) (Home Project)

I'm a fan of computational artwork. You know, fractal wallpapers and neon mushrooms and the like. For some reason, I thought I'd experiment with a little bit of gravitational based artwork and spent a few hours one evening throwing this together. The end result really isn't that great, honestly, but I thought I'd share it anyway. Personally, I didn't think it'd get much attention, but my website traffic logs have shown that the rose wallpaper seems to have been leeched as background wallpaper by a few girls on their blogs and websites. Not something I'd expected.

Tony Hawks Project 8 (J2ME) (Work Project) (!PAGE NOT WRITTEN YET!)

"..."
(Click the link above for more details)

2005 Pub Pool 3 (J2ME) (Work Project) (!PAGE NOT WRITTEN YET!)

"..."
(Click the link above for more details)

2004 Tiger Woods 2005 (J2ME) (Work Project)

"Having done a lot of engine reworking for Golf Club, the final Tiger game I worked on was, in my opinion, a huge leap in presentation and gameplay from the others..."
(Click the link above for more details)

Golf Club / Golf (J2ME) (Work Project) (!PAGE NOT WRITTEN YET!)

"..."
(Click the link above for more details)

2003 dbi 3D Golf (J2ME) (Work Project)

"...just a rebranding and slight rework on TW04. The basic reason for this was that there were some territories that Digital Bridges didn't have the rights to release a Tiger Woods game in..."
(Click the link above for more details)

Tiger Woods 2004 (J2ME) (Work Project)

"One thing we did spend a lot of time on, however, was adding a connected version! We created some additional courses that the player could download, and additional game modes..."
(Click the link above for more details)

Tomb Raider (J2ME) (Work Project) (!PAGE NOT WRITTEN YET!)

"..."
(Click the link above for more details)

Pub Pool (J2ME) (Work Project)

"I can't recall where the idea of making a pool game came from exactly, but Cam and I threw the basics of this together in just 2 weeks!..."
(Click the link above for more details)

007 Hover Chase (J2ME) (Work Project)

"At the time, the main Bond movie around was Die Another Day, so being assigned to this project meant I had a legitimate excuse to go see the film at the cinema "for research purposes". Sweet!..."
(Click the link above for more details)

Stuntman (J2ME) (Work Project)

"Back in 2002, Infogrames released a game called Stuntman on the PS2. It put the player in the role of a stuntman in several films, needing to drive various vehicles in a way dictated by the predefined story plot..."
(Click the link above for more details)

2002 Tiger Woods 2003 (J2ME) (Work Project)

"Okay, so we'd only be requiring one course (the illustrious Pebble Beach), not two like in Wentworth, but that still left a huge amount of changes and optimisation I'd need to look at..."
(Click the link above for more details)

Scooby Doo in Jeepers Creepers (J2ME) (Work Project)

"Another project that we did with Digital Bridges, DB came to us with the Scooby license and asked us to come up with a game for it. Our thoughts were to create another "sub-game pack" kind of game..."
(Click the link above for more details)

Munkiki's Castles (J2ME) (Work Project)

"...asked us to create a mobile game to be embedded on their new mobile handset, the 3410. And on top of that, it would be in 3D!!!"
(Click the link above for more details)

2001 Football Challenge (ExEn) (Work Project)

"As a result, the entirety of my first mobile game needed to fit in under 60KB (a positive luxury compared to some later projects, I must admit)..."
(Click the link above for more details)

Thunderbirds (WAP) (Work Project)

"Everyone came away after Wentworth Golf pretty satisfied with the end result. As a result, Digital Bridges commissioned us to create another WAP title for them..."
(Click the link above for more details)

Wentworth Golf (WAP) (Work Project)

"After the Dating Game, Cam and I ended up toying around making a golf WAP game, a combination of artist-generated animations and server created top-down and 3D views. And all in glorious 96x65 black and white..."
(Click the link above for more details)

The Dating Game / The Love Game (WAP) (Work Project)

"...a social networking application with a bit of a game thrown in. Again, written in Perl, the codebase was huge in comparison to the triviality of Dial-A-Word..."
(Click the link above for more details)

2000 MOSAnICk (Win32) (Home Project)

"MOSAnICk is a utility that creates mosaic-based pictures..."
(Click the link above for more details)

Virtual Rock (Win32) (Home Project)

This was a project I did in my spare time with Cam. We wanted to create a spoof virtual pet game, and Cam suggested a virtual rock. Obviously, rocks aren't hugely interactive, and so we added a whole bunch of pointlessness to the application, and we even made 6 different versions available (Aqua, Chocolate, Green, Rust, Scarlet and Violet) that people could download. However, it did pretty much nothing. Oh sure, you could try and entertain it and feed it, and even do mock-online-challenges with other rocks, but fundmentally everything it displayed was just completely random. We even decided to make the executable unnecessarily huge (by embedding uncompressed bitmaps in it, as opposed to optimising them) just to make the executable look larger (and, therefore, more impressive). And something in there must have worked as it got TONS of downloads when we made it available. It all goes to show... quite what, I'm not sure, but hey ho.

Dial-A-Word (WAP) (Work Project)

"Kind of a reverse-predictive-text game, Dial-A-Word was one of my first WAP games when io Productions started moving into the mobile space and becoming iomo..."
(Click the link above for more details)

1998 to 2000 Stampede (Win32 / Dreamcast) (Work Project)

"Back in May '98, a group of five people found themselves a small office in Eastleigh and, under the guise of a new company called "io Productions", started work on a new game. Based around sheep herding..."
(Click the link above for more details)

1998 ASCII Anim Editor (Win32) (Home Project)

Definitely of no interest to anyone these days, but years ago Cam used to make ASCII animations (i.e. animations just made from textual characters). To assist with this he asked if I'd mind creating a quicky animation tool, and this is the end result.

AD&D Psychology Test (DOS) (Home Project)

For no particular reason, back in '98 I decided to create a pseudo-psychology test where players would answer a bunch of questions and the code would suggest a character type for them to play. There's a 1,000,001 of these types of things on the net these days, but at the time there didn't seemt o be a huge number. Under the hood, each multiple choice answer affects a value on four scales (good/evil, lawful/chaotic, physical/mental, earthly/spiritual), and based on the combination of the selected answer from all questions it suggested an alignment and character class. I ran the thing originally up as some Javascript embedded on a webpage, but (can you believe it now) not everyone had Javascript (or trusted it back then), so I also ran off a DOS (!!!) version that people could use instead. Of course, time and mischevious hackers mean that executables are even less trusted these days than embedded Javascript, but hey ho - there's no real interest in the app any more, so I see little point in updating either version.

There have been quite a collection of other projects I've worked on over the years, but I won't go into details of them all as they're mostly ones that never really saw the light of day from a consumer persepctive (e.g. work projects that got cancelled part way through development, or home projects that never made it out of prototype stage due to lack of impetus). However, if you are interested in any of the above and would like more details, then do feel free to contact me and I'll see if there's anything further of interest that's worth sharing with everyone. Thanks for reading.

"If at first you don't succeed,"
"Then you must be a programmer."