art, illustration & design
I was honoured when Chris (Wilkins) invited me to join my old Sensible mate Jon Hare to give a talk about all things Sensible Software at the recent Retro Revival 2019 event in Walsall, UK.
The thing is I’ve never actually been to a retro gaming event before so I had no idea what it was going to be like. I’d seen a few photos on line from similar events but up until this point I hadn’t attend one. Crazy right?
What a crazy situation to be in, you’re about to make a cup of tea then all of a sudden you find yourself sitting down having a Retro Tea Break whilst being interviewed about your life and your work – I say interviewed, talking with Neil is more like sitting down with a mate and having a good old chin wag.
But in all seriousness, when Neil contacted me for an interview, what could I say? His channel is awesome, a real treasure trove of quality content professionally presented and edited – a proper treat if retro computing hardware, software and history is your thing. I was trying to think of what RMC feels like to me, and I reckon a close comparison would be to that of a TV show that would be on now if computing TV shows were still on the telly. You know the sort of shows that you kind of remember forever. For someone like me growing up in the 70s and 80s it would be like remembering BBC Micro Live especially that episode where we all got to see a glimpse of the mighty Amiga A1000.
I’ve been a regular viewer of the Retro Man Cave and the equally excellent The Back Office Show on Youtube for quite some time, so when the chief cave dweller Neil asked me if I would be interested in appearing on the Retro Island Diskettes podcast I immediately replied with a resounding YES!
After I’d accepted I then thought… would I actually be able to choose 8 tunes to take with me on the Retro Island? How wrong I was, in the end I had to shortlist my selection! It was a very close call on a couple of the tracks but I got there in the end and one thing I must say is the process really filled me with joy. I’d not listened to many of these tracks for years so hearing them again brought back memories of when I first heard them. Ahh but it wasn’t just the music, no… but memories of the people I was with, family, friends and the associated good times, all from hearing a handful of video game tunes! How cool is that? – And back in the day they said video games were a fad! Yeah…Right!
It was my genuine pleasure to answer a few questions from the lovely chaps at Arcade Attack Retro Gaming and I thank them for asking me. It’s always nice to talk about a subject that’s been part of my life for many many years and I appreciate the interest in my work.
>>>>Check out my interview here<<<<
Before I start this little post about what this little post is all about, can I ask if you would check out Fusion Magazine , you’ll understand why in minute. All I’ll say is it’s a rather nifty publication I’ve been honoured to have written for in the past, put together by some really talented folks who all share a genuine passion for video games.
So what’s this all about then? Well a few weeks ago Chris Wilkins (Time lord and publishing wizard) asked me if I would like to write something for an upcoming issue. Ok I said what did you have in mind? Erm.. something about Cannon Fodder if you can? (…cue long drawn out pause while my brain scrambles about thinking of what to say, what to write and why the dead pixel is Theresa May still PM(correct at time of keyboard tapping – thankfully she’s going going gone!).. well maybe that last part is every day – am I alone here?)
An update to an interview I gave to the excellent Retro Video Gamer website a few years ago with answers to new questions and soem of the things I’ve been upto since.
Please check it out along with many of the other excellent interviews and reviews too.
Check the image link below… Lovely stuff..
I’ve been a regular user of the rather excellent art package GIMP for quite some years and have found it to be a fantastic tool for manipulating digital art, touching up scanned sketches or laying out pixel art for use in a video game project; it’s never let me down. If I have ever needed something that wasn’t included from the off, then a quick search online often yields a solution in the way of a plugin or extension that has me up and running in no time. So when I recently wanted to use some of my old Amiga files I was surprised IFF file support was not included. It’s not a big deal as something like XnView will convert the file to PNG and the results from experience have always been great but wouldn’t it be nice to load these image files directly, no conversion, no messing about, just convenience and no excuses.
As development on Blobbit Push draws to an end there’s a list of things that need fixing, sorting and tweaking before the game can be published. One of ‘these things’ is to compile a list of all the animations we’re using for the front end UI. Stuff like level select, pause menu, you get the idea. Now I could go with my original intention of just typing the name of each animation into a spreadsheet, not the quickest option as I would manually have to read through every animation and type it up. Not really up for that, especially when there’s artwork to create! Hang about wouldn’t it be great if you could screen grab the text and paste it into a document? Hmmm, well it turns out there’s something out there that does just that and it’s called Capture2Text for Windows. (http://capture2text.sourceforge.net/)
So how does this work then? Incredibly easy me old china, let me show you.
A 3rd Blobbit game has been on the cards for quite some time, we didn’t really plan it as part of some grand plan; we knew when the time was right a game we would make. That time was late 2017, the game we started was Blobbit Push (1.5).
The very first Blobbit game
Before I write about what the third game I should mention the original game was just going to be called “Blobbit”. This changed not too long after I’d finished creating the main sprite, I started having all sorts of ideas about what this strange green blob was and the sort of world he inhabited. It was then we opted to call it Blobbit Dash, a very simple game that involved collecting lost Blobbit Babies and evading baddies, all played on a single screen. There were no levels as such, the game just kept getting faster and faster with each wave of baddies cleared. We didn’t even have more than a single background, it was quite sparse you could say but fun to play. Despite its minimalist design the base idea was there and this soon materialised into something with a bit more depth; Blobbit Push was born based unashamedly on Sokoban but with the addition of baddies. The naming convention felt right too, calling it Blobbit Push not only kept it under a single branding umbrella but also served to strengthen the IP if we later chose to expand upon it.
What seems like an eternity of web development woes, which I should state was mostly down to my own inexperience of server side geeky techie stuff, the new site has finally gone live on this 26th day of October 2017.
The old hobeka.com site will be removed and all future content will be added to this new site. NO more manually editing HTML pages, no more fiddling around with FTP and No furrther head scratching when it comes to browser CSS compatibility!
