NOW! ScreenshotWith the end of 2010, now is the time after all the wild parties and heavy drinking to look back on the year that just ended 🙂 Overall, I think it was a great year with many of my personal achievements accomplished 🙂

The year began with a very big bang for me as I had started working on Zine at the beginning of the year. Zine was to be my first big contribution to the scene in a very long time, since my Amiga days actually, and I was very excited to be able to travel to Evoke in Germany and see it unveiled, talk to the people who read it, and cook a few sausages for people attending the release party. I got to meet a lot of cool people, a lot of people who I idolized as a spotty nerd teen, and most of my fellow Brainstorm guys. I was also proud to get Bit Arts and Romeo Knight (musicians from the Red Sector Megademo) together in the same room for beers \o/ Lots of beer, tears and laughs were had that weekend 🙂 It was definitely my greatest moment this year and I can’t thank everyone who helped on this project enough! Issue 15 will appear some time soon! [Zine #14 Page | Pouet Link]

The next big personal acheivement for me came with working with Ultrasyd on a last-minute Amstrad CPC project called NOW! I spent most of my early life developing on the Sinclair Spectrum and I had wanted to get back into 8-bit coding for quite some time. The Spectrum & Amstrad are very similar in design. Syd and Fenyx Kell composed the music for the project, and I threw a very basic interface together in about 2-3 weeks to get the release ready for Main party. Boy were we shocked when we scored a 3rd place win! Completely unexpected, as we weren’t really trying to win anything 🙂 Again, the feeling was great to see the video being played on the big screen, and watching people’s reactions. Great job guys 🙂 [NOW! Page | Pouet Link]

Another project I was proud to be involved with this year was the Alien Invasion music disk supported by Nectarine, and coded by maep. This disk took the 4sceners.de award for the best music disk of 2010. Nectarine is a demoscene web radio station, using the Demovibes codebase that I work on with Terrasque (Project Page). Congratulations to everyone involved, especially maep who stayed up late to talk to me, and for working so hard on the project! [Pouet Link]

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to release any new games this year though I have been working on some projects. I have been working a lot on the new Piles’O’Tiles engine, which i’m not sure yet when it will be ready. I have also started working on some Android code, so I am hoping to be bringing some of my games to this exciting platform. The first game released will most likely be Jelly Othelly, but I may change my mind in the future with that and release something else instead, like Piles’O’Tiles.

I am pretty sure I have forgotten to add something epic to this post, so I apologize ahead of time and will keep editing it as time goes on to thank all the great people that helped me this year. It’s time to enjoy a bit of 2011 with a large pint of beer and a compiler!

FishGuy876