Category: Current

My current projects – May 2016

Unity – Escape the sector

cliff building escape vector

I’ve abandoned the Escape Velocity game where you control a spaceship on rails, in favour of one where you’ve got more control, and it’s a race against time to finish the track. It’s a simplistic idea, but I’m hoping to make it exciting with explosions. Yes. Explosions are cool.

I’ve written a bit more about this here.

Burnthebook

I’ve been building website frontends for work, which is going fine. My latest project has used Foundation 6 (previously I’ve used 5), and CraftCMS which is new to me. I’ve also been wireframing a few projects, using Protoshare (which I’ve written about here).

burnthebook website on mobile

I’ve just finished the company’s main website – www.burnthebook.co.uk

Current projects

So why did I even make this website? There’s no shortage of places online to place content, and…well… I do spread content all over! I split my efforts so thought it’d be nice to have a central place to bind it all together.

OngoingWorlds.com

A roleplay website I created. It’s been going about 5 years now, and has plenty of active users (there’s some stats here).

Recently I’ve added 3 site moderators who help to manage other players and games. Which has been enormously useful!

I’ve just finished a fairly large re-skin of the site, focussing on frontend only. This is part 1 of planned changes & I need to get into the next part now which is to give more features to the members who’ve donated. Yes I take donations from players but don’t make a profit, it all goes back into the hosting cost.

Warhammer 40k

So for about a year (I think) I’ve been playing 40K with @CadianShock, & enjoying it quite a bit. I struggle with all the rules (there are a LOT!), but enjoy painting the models & scenery. There’s a battle report for our most recent game here.

3D modelling/Game dev

This is a recent resurgence of an old hobby. I used to love making Flash games, and recently started learning Unity the free game dev toolkit. I sidetracked myself quite a lot though by making 3D assets for the game first, and uploading them to Turbosquid for instant gratification! I’ve been writing about the development on an IndieDB blog here.

I’ve completed some games, and uploaded them to Newgrounds.com (see them here), which includes some very old Flash games. My most recent is Starbug Thruster, themed around Blue Dwarf, a Red Dwarf themed game on OngoingWorlds which has been going for almost 15 years!

Silktide/Haystack

Without a doubt the project I’m spending most time on is Haystack for Silktide. This is because it’s my full time job. More about Haystack here.

SciFi Ideas podcast

We haven’t done one for a while but I regularly record a podcast with my brother who runs SciFiIdeas.com. I’ve contributed several articles there in the past. There’s a YouTube playlist of all the podcasts here.