by ·Comments Off on Make bad decisions in space with Crisis, Captain!

Cover art for Crisis, Captain!Everyone has had a fantasy of commanding a star ship on a mission of exploration through the galaxy. Now, you too can experience the thrill and the tension and the stress of starship command in Crisis, Captain!

Wormholes, abandoned space stations, arguments with your officers and hostile warships are just some of the things you are likely to encounter in an average mission. Can you complete it without your ship exploding, your crew dying or your officers revolting? Well, no, you can’t – one of those things will definitely happen, but how much can you discover before the end inevitably comes?

I’m soft launching my first game into the internet today. Crisis, Captain! is a free Android game and is still in development with new content and fixes being released semi-regularly. This is pretty much the first thing that I’ve ever created that has a certain degree of completion to it, the first finished project I’ve managed in Unity and the first game I’ve built for mobile.

Update: There is now a PC build available for Crisis Captain over on Itch.io – it is very much the definition of a lazy port, but it took me about five minutes to throw together. Basically I can see how tempting it must be for developers to make bad ports now.

You can download Crisis, Captain! for free from itch.io for Android and PC.

by ·Comments Off on Oh look, it’s a blog

I’m sure a lot of you have been saying “gosh, you’ve been awfully quiet over there haven’t you?” and you’d be right, I have been quiet, at least on this particular digital outlet.

I have been writing on a very regular basis at my old haunt Bit-Tech. I write something news-like over there pretty much every morning and even have a regular column on their blog. You can click here to see  the David Hing Bit-Tech blog archives. Not only am I writing there which is of course a massive draw for anyone,  but the other guys writing for the site are uniformly excellent.

I’m also no longer working at M&M and am instead working in digital marketing for an insurance company. Although I was initially reluctant to cross over to the “dark side” that is marketing, the work’s pretty good, the company is Not Evil and they let me write crazy things like this from time to time.

I’ve got a couple of projects in the works once again, most of which gaming related, and I’m tempted to write a little bit about them although I find actually writing about a project is the fastest way to kill it off for good, so I’m a little reluctant to talk about the game that I am making and have got quite far with. All I shall say is that it is set in space and I no longer recognise half the code I’ve actually written.

Additional Notes:

Fun fact: It’s really rather difficult to post something on a blog that has been dormant for as long as this one has. If you go through my archives, you’ll find quite a few posts that basically make excuses as to why I haven’t posted for a while.

There’s even a sub-category of that type of post whereby I comment on the fact that there are a lot of posts where I apologise for not posting for a while.

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I have a belief that anyone trying to create anything will inadvertently create self portraits of themselves over and over again without even realising.

I have started working on some pixel art for a new project and was very proud of some alterations I made on my ‘Ding sprite’ from Ego to make him a low level dungeon-crawling adventurer.

 

 

I thought that looked pretty good, until my girlfriend noticed the following things:

1) That’s probably closer to my actual hair colour anyway.

2) I appear to be wearing that particular tee-shirt today.

Right down to the V-neck.

Score one for extra confidence in a theory, lose one for falling back into artistic self-insertion habits.

by ·Comments Off on Curiosity Killed The World

As part of my Learn By Doing series of films like my stop motion adventure a few days ago, I did something in live action this time.

Lesson learnt from this video:  You can cover a lot of sins with sound.  I think every one who offers film making advice online says it, but you never really appreciate it until you record something horribly crackly.

There are some out there that might say “well if you’re not 100% happy with it, why publish it?” and to them I say good point, but also I want to share my mistakes to maybe help someone else not make them, or to feel better also making mistakes.

 

 

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For a while now, as you might be able to tell from some of the comments I made about online broadcast technology a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been dying to make a video series of some sort, because I can’t quite work out why I haven’t already.

Today, I have taken a short break from clattering away at my keyboard to try and learn a few video editing skills, using the first few things that I could find near to my desk.  Two of those such things happened to be some LEGO figures, so that goes to explain this stupid little stop motion clip that I’ve created to try and teach myself the basics of video editing.

I found the music on a creative commons royalty free site called incompetech.  Creative commons licenses seem to be a wondrous thing that I’m going to have to learn more about, because it strikes me as the most incredible thing the internet is able to provide right now.

Things I have learnt today:  Stop motion is hard and time consuming and a real art form that I would love to dive a bit further in to and Creative Commons is the future.