Well the latest game is up, its been a month since Synapsis launched and I needed to work on a nice small game and came up with “the flying platypus”, it was mainly programmed as I was watching Blackburn Rovers on the 4pm game on a Sunday afternoon on Sky Sports. The match was so boring that to pass the time I did a little game as an experiment and it turned into a full game.

Its just a 60 seconds waste of time affair but it seems quite fun to play. The game mechanic is mainly just a simple distance game with a bit of skill and quite a lot of luck.

anyway enough waffle go and have a play of the Flying Platypus.

Well the latest game went up 2 weeks ago, its called Synapsis and its a voyage into the mind of David Carter, a completely odd adventure game that I’ve been trying to make for about 3 years. The production started about June time 2007 but the idea had been floating round my head in various forms for ages, the only problem was that it was June before I’d got good enough at programming to be able to make it. The actual game is pretty straightforward as I really didn’t want to do anything too illogical although the settings and the atmosphere of the game is really “David Lynch”. I’ve half got the sequel worked on but I need a break, this game completely did my head in during the last month of development.

The game was half designed by Jason Jackson, who was at work experience were I used to work, his 2 rooms were the church and the cell, I thought he did a pretty amazing job.
Its been reviewed on a couple of the big casual games sites like Jayisgames and has gone down really well. I’ve also had endless people email me in the last week for help as they are stuck, if you are one of them there’s a really nice synapsis walkthrough on mousebreaker.

Now that its finished I’m taking a well earned rest from stupid projects and am going to sit back with a beer and watch football for at least 3 days before starting on the sequel.

Anyway enough of me waffling on about, if you want to loose 15 minutes of your life go and play Synapsis.

Vector Magic is a new online package from Stanford University for converting bitmap images into vector based artwork. Vectors are great because they are scalable you can print them at any size and they still look nice and crisp. I often find I’ve been doodling a character and want to use them in flash which likes vectors better than bitmaps so I have in the past spent a couple of hours converting the bitmap into a vector by tracing it.

Vector magic takes your bitmap and converts it automatically after you make a series of choices  about your image. The above shows the results, I gave the packages a thumbnail image of panda Bob and the right is the vector output. There have been functions like this for a while, flash has trace bitmap and illustrator has a similar tool but neither produce good results and usually the amount of vector points used is horrific. From a few tests on stuff like panda Bob the output is as good as if I’d hand traced it.