I'm back living in the Scotland now \o/ I'm totally happy to be home, I've missed the place. Picked up some awesome contract work in January, involving scaling a live video feed to thousands of users, designed to run on the Amazon EC2 platform:

Moving upwards to Dundee to start some technical lead work with the awesome team at Play2Improve, super excited about that, as it's primarily Unity and scaling challenges, hurrah! Found a nice flat, just need to sort out the referencing details and I'm good.

I'm getting excited about the next Ludum Dare as well, I know it's like 2 months away, but the Global Game Jam wet my appetite for more. I couldn't make it for the beginning of the jam, but went along on the final day to chat and check out the games, some great stuff done in 48hrs! I don't think I posted my Ludum Dare #19 results; I came 31st overall, I was chuffed just to make the top 50! Especially out of 242 submissions. I also scored highly for some categories: #4 - Graphics and #6 - Coolness. Bonus!

So I entered Ludum Dare at the weekend, my very first LD! It was amazing, seriously, if you are into making games, and are lacking motivation on your current projects. Just do it! The community feel on the site and IRC is worth taking part for alone.

So, the theme this time was discovery, which was kind of a generic theme. I went with a space shooter thing, where you have to scan for, then harvest PSIENC orbs, to power your ship and stay alive. The controls are a bit wonky, but I might come back to it at a later date.

Anyway, you can play the game and download the messy source code over on the PSIENC entry page.

Tools used: pivotal tracker, dropbox, unity pro, blender, photoshop, sfxr, audicity and a Sony PSP with a gameboy emulator loaded with LSDJ

I also posted playable snapshot builds while I was making it to show iterative progress throughout the weekend.

Click on a thumbnail below to play a Unity web build of the development snapshot at the time:

The Last Minute Hero browser demo is now playable, compete against your friends (or mortal enemies) on Facebook for the highest survival time!

Play Now on Facebook!

Then maybe buy the AppStore version? :) Or if you're reading this before All Hallows' Eve - it's most likely FREE!

Last Minute Hero on iTunes

Code snippet highlighting? yay \o/

Unityscript Test

 
function Awake() : void
{
	var cacheTransform : Transform = gameObject.transform;
}

C# Test

 
public void Awake()
{
	Transform cacheTransform = gameObject.transform;
}

Last Minute Hero from Squax on Vimeo.