Games Britannia Live - A great success!

I won't bore you with the details of how we got to Games Britannia Live in Sheffield and all that, but we got there, and it was amazing!

Rich and I attended together on the Saturday and Mark Hardisty (the brilliant organiser of the show) kindly lent us his Nexus 10 for us to show off our game as we only had access to 7" tablets and our smartphones. I also attended the Sunday to give out more demos and also to take my daughter to the Moshi Monsters game level design workshop by Sumo Digital Ltd. It was a great experience for her and I also met a lot of my developer friends over the weekend including the brilliant Byron Atkinson Jones who was running a unity class for developers at the show and Ste Pickford one of my personal heroes of game development.

We set up our table in the indie section along with our friends from 4 Door Lemon, Utopian Sandwich, Retroburn studios and Boneloaf. The venue was excellent and we had a steady stream of people coming past the table and stopping to chat and try out the game.

The game seems to appeal to just about everybody, surprisingly lots of ladies and kids wanted to play Zombie Piranha. Luckily we decided a while ago that any gore in the game would be very cartoony and swapped out a lot of the red blood for green zombie blood.

We got lots of praise for the gameplay and graphics, and people were able to grab a copy of the game by scanning the QR codes we plastered all over everything or by searching just the word 'Piranha' on google play (searching Zombie Piranha brings up thousands of zombie games before finding ours!)

The version we released consists of 5 starter levels and the full easy version of Fin-Durance! This allows people to have a proper limitless experience of the gameplay and try out many of the power-ups before we launch the full version. (Hopefully later this year!)

GRAB IT NOW FOR FREE! -

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appytimes.zp

Zombie Piranha at Games Britannia Live weekend festival 28th-29th June

If you're in Sheffield this weekend you'll be able to view the latest Zombie Piranha demo in the flesh!

You'll find us in the indie section of Games Britannia Live at the Millennium gallery.

See the official website for details... http://live.gamesbritannia.com

for updates on twitter look for the hashtag #zombiepiranha

15000 download challenge for CLONE ZOO HD, we currently need only around 80 downloads in order to reach 15,000, help us get there in time for Games Britannia Live on Saturday. FREE download available for Android smartphones and tablets on Google Play - Clone Zoo HD - FREE download

Jack The Nipper! Games Britannia 2014

As my friends and followers online know I'm a huge fan of old retro video games, especially stuff made in the 80s by Gremlin Graphics of Sheffield.

Jack the nipper cartoony mock-up screen I made for the Games Britannia 2014 schools challenge competition. Please visit Games Britannia Schools Competition 2014

For the past couple of years I've been involved with the Games Britannia game jams which has given me a fantastic opportunity to mingle with my heroes of the 8 bit era of British gaming who inspired me to get into working in gamedev. The thing I loved most about Gremlin Graphics games in particular were the brilliant cartoon characters such as Monty Mole, Zool, Potty Pigeon, Bounder etc. Amongst my favourite games of the time was Jack The Nipper, who was pretty much like the Beano character Sweeny Toddler and got into all kinds of mischief to fill up his "naughtyometer" whilst trying to avoid getting a spanking! (this was the 80s!)

Back in the late 90s, early 2000s when it looked like these games were never going to reappear from the archives I was involved with some groups of Retro Remakers. We we bedroom programmers, musicians and artists who worked together to try to recreate our favourite old games from scratch to run on modern PCs often playing around with the graphics but trying to match the original gameplay that we loved so much.

In 2003  I had a go at making a Jack The Nipper demo, I was using software called The Games Factory by Clickteam, which instead of using programming had an event editor and a drag and drop level builder. Until recently the files were stuck on a hard drive as unfortunately TGF wouldn't open the files in Windows 7. Luckily Multimedia Fusion was recently on sale in the Humble Bundle and I was able to get a copy of that to restore the files and re-compile the demo.

Here's the demo, It's only 1 screen as the movement in Jack The Nipper allows you to walk around the floor, jump up the shelves and grab the pea shooter to fire at the baddies. Although it doesn't sound much, to a non-programmer this was quite a challenge to get working.

I hope you enjoy it! Game Demo Exe file

My old 2003 demo screens.

Space = Start Game

Arrows = Move

Shift = Jump

Ctrl = Fire

1 or 2 = put object in pocket

ESC = QUIT

Original game is copyright Gremlin Graphics, this was made for educational purposes and must not be sold in any form.

Zool fan art and Monty Mole artwork from the Games Britannia Game Jams

Don't think I posted these images before, but I was invited to help out at the Games Britannia 2013 Game Jam. Following the success of the 2012 one where I helped out with some Monty Mole games for the schools taking part in the competition. Being an avid fan and sometimes retro-remaker of the beloved Gremlin Graphics games I grew up playing in the 80s, I jumped at the chance to share my passion for the games with others and lent my skills as a graphic artist to help out the kids with their games.

A vectorised version of the old Gremlin Logo.

Monty Mole returns to help Monty Mole Jr in the apocalypse!

Monty Mole Jr sets off on his adventures.

For 2013 the theme was switched to another of Gremlins heroes... Zool. I worked on box art this time, the kids were even more enthusiastic this time and they had created some amazing artwork, so my part of the jam was mainly doing layout work for them which was great fun and gave them a lot of pride to see their work on the boxes.

Before the Jam I created a quick vector version of the Zool artwork from the original box for fun (like you do!) :D I didn't use this but thought I'd share it on my blog anyway...

The original box artwork.

My vector version Fan Art.

I was a huge fan of Gremlin Games and look forward to seeing what else they resurrect in the future and hopefully we will see new titles appear from their brilliant archive of games with character. I would especially love to see the return of Jack The Nipper! (Maybe next time?..)