Games 'n that

Ortis:

As mentioned on Ben Chandler's blog, we've been collaborating on a new game for some months.  It's being developed primarily in AGS, with a view to releasing an XAGE version of the game on as many platforms as we can.  It's early days yet, but the quality of Ben's initial artwork is very high indeed, and improving with each scene:



Rather than porting it at the end of the development cycle and being overwhelmed with hundreds of bugs, the game is being ported iteratively.  This means I can squash most issues as and when they occur, and being able to play early builds on the Xbox and Windows Phone has been important in making sure the interface is simple and intuitive across all platforms.

It's a massively exciting project to be a part of.  I'll try to blog about this more as things ramp up.

Prime Minister's Questions:

About eighteen months ago, I agreed to attempt a port of Mark Richards' then beta AGS game, Prime Minister's Questions.  It proved to be a good test case for the early C# scripting engine, though a chronic lack of free time and some unfortunate technical issues with third party libraries meant it was only about 90% complete.  Mark released the AGS version shortly after and got some decent coverage within the  mainstream press.

After recently taking another look at latest (and most likely, last) version of Silverlight, I found I was able to finally complete the job.  I'm quite pleased with the results - whilst there are still improvements to be made, general performance is much better than the original port of Awakener back in 2010:



Mark's now working on a new HTML5 & Javascript powered PMQs, so I look forward to seeing a smug, pixelated George Osborne receiving his parliamentary comeuppance.