As anyone who has followed the fortunes of Llamasoft over the years will know, I have a certain affinity with bovines. My coding handle for years was “Yak”. I’ve always identified somewhat with oxen – udeful animals, not necessarily the sharpest tool in the box but possessing the patience and strength to get the job done – traits that I find admirable, and that I can usefully hope to emulate in my own work. Completing a project taking a year or more takes a certain amount of determined plodding, bovine stoicness. Oxen are gentle, patient, and get the job done. And often they have lovely horns.

One day back in 2006 when Giles was away I was sat here on my own and I was thinking about how oxen, although doubtlessly useful throughout human history, are seldom much celebrated. They are not a glamorous animal, the bovine equivalent of a tractor. Often taken for granted. Did anyone ever, I wondered, think of an ox as something lovely? Something beautiful, to be admired? Something precious?
So as you do, I did an idle Google search, for “precious ox”.

Following the resulting links I found myself reading an academic paper entitled “The Amazonian Ox Dance Festival: An Anthropological Account”. It told of a place in northern Brazil, in Amazonia, where there takes place a festival, virtually unknown outside of Brazil: “The festival is a peculiar development of a folk play that has existed in Brazil since the 19th century and is based on the motif of the death and resurrection of a precious ox.”

(You can read the academic paper here, and I thoroughly recommend it; it’s a fascinating read).

I read on into the night, fascinated. The festival takes place on the island of Tupinambarana, a day’s passage by boat down river of the capital of Amazonas, Manaus. It is a celebration of the cultural blending of the people of the region and comprises aspects of Amazonian tribal mythology, Catholicism and African mythos brought to the region by the slave trade. It takes place in the city of Parintins, a town only reachable by river or by a small airfield, and once a year at the end of June two teams compete in a three-day competition of dance, music and astonishing artistry and creativity. The entire town is divided into areas of red and blue, the colours of the two teams named for the underlying bovine theme of the competition – “Boi Caprichoso”, the Capricious Ox, whose avatar is a black ox with a star on his forehead; and “Boi Garantido”, the Reliable Ox, a white ox with a red heart on his forehead.

Parintins lies just below the equator, 24 hours downriver from Manaus.

The two rival oxen, Boi Caprichoso and Boi Garantido

The “Brincadeiro do Boi”, or ox-play, the tale of the death and resurrection of a precious ox, is something that has taken place in various parts of Brazil for hundreds of years. But only in Parintins has it become the huge festival that it is now, and the performances have expanded to include material celebrating the Amazonian environment and “cabloco” culture of the local people, and blends Amazonian, European and African religion and mythos in an incredible display of artistry. Underpinning it all is the central theme of the tale of the ox, and in the performance the arrival of the ox – Caprichoso or Garantido – draws the wildest cheers from the fans.

Boi Caprichoso dances. Behind you can see members of the Marujada da Guerra, Caprichoso's percussion group.

Everything in the town is divided into red and blue. It is one of the few places in the world where you will see a blue Coca-Cola logo – no supporter of Caprichoso, whose colours are black and blue, would be keen to drink Coke from a red can, so the company produce blue cans for the Caprichoso supporters. Images of the two rival oxen are everywhere. Even the phone boxes are shaped like oxen. Everybody loves their chosen ox – Caprichoso or Garantido – with a passion.

Even Coca-Cola comes in red and blue colours in Parintins.

Even the phone booths in Parintins are shaped like oxen.

All this sounded amazing, and I jumped on the then-nascent Youtube to see if I could find anything relating to this amazing-sounding bovine festival. Back then there wasn’t a lot to be found, but I did find this one clip that blew me away:

It starts out simply enough, you see the black ox dancing, and then as the clip progresses you begin to see the scale of the thing: the ox is dancing on the palm of a giant animated statue, and that statue is itself dwarfed by the scale of the massive arena in which the performance is taking place.

The arena, like the town itself, is divided in red and blue.

A giant Boi Caprichoso hovers over the arena.

I remember seeing that clip and thinking then and there, holy cow, one day I have to go there, see that. Being at that point years from the end of my mortgage and God help me trying to make video games at that time that seemed like a far distant “one day, maybe” though.

In the years that followed we continued to learn about the Parintins festival. I ordered a copy of Caprichoso’s CD of songs for 2006, and that stayed in the CD player of our Toyota for many months (in the process allowing us to learn a peculiarly ox-specific subset of the Brazilian Portuguese language). Eventually all the songs became available on Boi Caprichoso’s web site, so I’d go there to hear each new year’s music. Youtube eventually began to host more videos of the Festival, and these days each night’s performances are generally available to view by the following day. You can even watch the performances live if you hook up to the stream from TVAcritica.

Now I’m getting to the sort of age where you start to realise that perhaps you ought to get round to doing some of the things you’ve always wanted to do, while you still can; and mercifully my mortgage is but a distant memory. So tomorrow morning we will be outside to catch the bus to Carmarthen, the first, mundane step on a journey that will culminate in our arrival in the Bumbodromo, the huge arena that I first saw in that old Youtube clip. We’ll be travelling to Parintins via a 24-hour boat journey from Manaus, the capital of Amazonia, and we’ll be sleeping on the boat for the duration of the Festival. As Caprichoso supporters we’ll be sitting on the blue side of the Bumbodromo. This year’s performances should be especially good – Caprichoso having won the previous two years’ competitions are out to take a rare consecutive third win, while Garantido will be doing their best to break Caprichoso’s streak. Both teams will be pulling out all the stops to outdo one another in the arena.

The tribal shaman flies in on an actual working hoverboard to resurrect the precious ox Caprichoso.

I still find it weird to think that after all these years I’ll finally get to see Parintins with my own eyes, to sit in the arena watching the ox dance, surrounded by people singing of their love for the ox, the “touro amado”, the beloved bull. That old idle Google search will have led me to the one place on earth where oxen are celebrated with such joy.

Expect more posts when I get back. I’ll have lots of pictures.

We spent about a month getting some stuff up and running on there. I made a simple little VR game inspired by my iOS game ‘Minotaur Rescue’. It was a simple game played in a sphere; your little ship was entirely controlled by where you were looking, it didn’t need you to use a controller at all. The gameplay was quite simple, shoot rocks and enemies and rescue the little minotaurs that were floating around in the play area.

Minotaur Rescue VR

We ended up porting this to Oculus and Gear VR. We showed it at a couple of exhibitions and put a demo version up in the Gear VR app store but it was never widely distributed at all; we didn’t expect to make any money with it really, it was more of a learning exercise for us to dip a toe into VR.

Following that we did a complete overhaul and upgrade of TxK onto the PS4 and introducing support for PSVR. This was then ported to the PC and Oculus and again we took it around to a couple of exhibitions where we found that people really liked it, that although as a game it didn’t *need* VR in order to work, it actually felt pretty great to be surrounded by everything as you played through the game, particularly when you finished a level and it smashed all around you as you flew off the level. It imparted a Tron-like feeling of being *inside* an 80s arcade game, something I loved and which was absolutely on my mind when it came time to make Polybius.

Of course those versions of TxK have never been released, for reasons I don’t need to belabour here. However it is not out of the question that there may yet be some way for that work to see the light of day again. We’ll see.

By the time that was done, PSVR was getting a lot closer to its eventual release spec and we had a much better idea of what we might be able to get out of it. We went to Sony with little more than a video of an environment test we’d done (on Oculus at that point), my folder full of “influences” pics, and me basically saying “we’ll make something really cool in VR!”. We got the go-ahead from them and when I was thinking of what we’d call the game I remembered the old legend of Polybius and I thought it’d be neat to do something inspired by all that, but using modern VR techniques to make it super immersive and awesome. I’d noted people becoming positively euphoric while playing the VR versions of TxK, and I thought that if we could make a game that engendered feelings like that in its users, that would kind of fit in with the legendary Polybius’ reputation for being psychoactive (albeit in a harmless, positive way, unlike the brainwashing, disturbing way that the legendary Polybius was said to work).

We knew that to do a complete new game we’d need to get an implementation of our Neon lightsynth engine working on PS4, so we started out from that. The game was to be made so that it’d be playable in normal 2D as well as VR mode, but I absolutely wanted it to be primarily an excellent VR experience, so I wanted to do as much of the actual development of the environments and effects as I could directly in the VR space. To that end we needed to extend the Neon engine to be able to do stereo 3D, and I began to build an editor that functioned inside of VR, allowing you to adjust and animate the parameters that generated the environments and see the results floating all around you as you worked.

An early test of the VR Neon editor

This editor ended up being quite a complex and versatile beast, and while it ended up being just what we needed to make the environments for Polybius it did take up a few months of development time. Probably more than I’d anticipated. Giles would come up with some interesting Neon modules, and I’d play around with them, but as time went on I became increasingly anxious about the fact that we had a decent editor coming along but I didn’t have any actual gameplay to speak of running yet!

This came to a head one time when Giles went off back to Italy for a few days and it was getting close to the time when we were due to have a meeting with Sony to show them our progress – and I still didn’t have any game! So I thought “right! let’s get something down!” and just started throwing down some of the ideas I had on the simplest surface I had, a plane that I’d been using as a scroll test.

Scroll test plane and bulls in the editor

I made a little ship in a Neon stack and hooked it up to the controller. I gave it a gun and some shots, and made a level sequencer that just spat out little white placeholder cubes for enemies. I made it so you could shoot them and they’d blow up. I put in some shootable terrain blocks, and then I played around with that. It felt good, so I put on some Underworld and made gates that boosted you when you flew through them.

Suddenly that felt *excellent*. Flying through those gates, building up to crazy speed, and shooting these little white blocks that exploded all around you – I remember having a massive grin and realising that I’d finally found the direction I wanted to go with the gameplay.

Giles came back and I excitedly handed him the headset and told him to have a go and he had pretty much the exact same reaction that I did. We knew we had the start of something nice. It was a massive relief to me because I’d been waiting for that moment to come for a while. Sometimes it feels like it’ll never come, but it always does in the end.

Testing out early Polybius ideas.

We went to our meeting with Sony (and I remember that being initially a bit fraught, as it turned out we’d been building to some odd, obscure version of the OS that nobody had on a devkit there any more, and quite some faffing needed done before we could even get our demo running). It was still pretty much a bare bones concept, having only taken any definite shape a couple of weeks before, and I wasn’t sure what the guys would make of it. We gave the headset to our chief dude, and people gathered round to watch on the social screen while he played. Now as I am sure you know if you’ve played it in VR, it doesn’t really convey the same feeling watching it from outside in 2D as it does when you’re right there inside it, and the people watching outside thought it looked just OK.

Then our guy came out of the headset grinning and told us that after 2 minutes playing he’s “felt like a Jedi”. This was what we’d been hoping to hear . Everyone else had a go and people definitely loved it once they got inside and had a go.

We got our go-ahead for the next stage of development, and retired happy to the Pelton Arms in Greenwich (our favourite London pub where we always stay when we’re in town for meetings; they have great beer and excellent music and a famous cat and a great breakfast in the morning, we’ve been there so many times now we’re treated like locals, and they even have a credit in Polybius, check the credits page).

There I drank a not inconsiderable amount of relief beer at having made it to the next stage. Now we just had to make the other 95% of the game!

On the surface of it you could look at the game and argue that the whiners are right. Such plot as is present is stretched exceedingly thin. After the first few hours you will have experienced most of the core gameplay loops and perhaps be wanting for something a bit deeper. It’s evident in various places throughout the game that things that were intended to be in there have been taken out or switched off. You can find “stargates” on some planets but they are deactivated. Observatories – which usually study the stars – refer to locating signals “deep in the cosmos” but inevitably only yield locations on the planet you happen to be on. You have a “reputation” with each of the three alien races which can be improved by doing certain things but it doesn’t seem to have much bearing on anything. Space battles are more of an occasional inconvenience than particularly epic. From some aspects the game is flawed and somewhat incomplete. Planets aren’t rendered photorealistically. There’s not enough variation. I could go on and on but you get the idea.

Despite all that though it’s probably been the game I’ve played the most since Skyrim. Every single night I usually end up with an hour or two of NMS before I go to bed. I think that what’s keeping me there playing is that when I’m playing it I’m seeing and enjoying the stuff that they got right, the things that weren’t omitted, enough that I really don’t care that much about the things that aren’t there.

When I was a nipper I was brought up on a steady diet of Asimov and Clarke. The covers of the books I liked to read looked like this.

And this.

Lovely stuff, and I loved the psychedelic cover artwork as much as the stories inside the books.

I also was there during the paleolithic era of computer graphics, when memory and processor constraints meant that displays had pixels the size of house bricks and being able to display more than eight colours was considered to be the height of graphical sophistication. One of the most astounding games of the day, something which truly had my jaw on the floor the first time I beheld it on my much-loved Atari 8-bit system (already host to the best game of all time at that point in history, “Star Raiders”). The game was called “Rescue on Fractalus” (or “Behind Jaggi Lines” in the pre-release bootleg I had somehow managed to get my hands on). It looked like this:

Now of course to anyone in this day and age that looks rough as a badger’s arse, so it’s difficult to relay how astonishing it was for me and others back at that time. Game worlds back then were almost exclusively 2D affairs. Some more adventurous titles ventured into 3D but normally with nothing more than a few stars whizzing by and 2D sprites for enemies, a simple but effective formula used to great effect by the aforementioned Star Raiders. Here came Fractalus though and suddenly you weren’t just floating through sparse starfields any more; you could actually descend to a planet’s surface, see its jagged mountains rendered in solid 3D, and even fly between them and land on the surface, all at a frame rate that nearly approached being quite close to double figures. It was revolutionary, and I sunk many hours into that game even though at the end of the day there was a shockingly small amount of things to actually do there. You flew around, shot some turrets, picked up some dudes and fried some enemies, and once you’d seen one planet you’d seen them all. Pac Man had more advanced actual gameplay when it comes down to it. But that didn’t matter so much to me because it was just awesome to be actually looking out through the window on my spaceship, flying between those mountain peaks, landing and picking up dudes. On a 1MHz 8-bit system it was also a bloody miracle of programming, let me tell you.

The mountains and sky were even that Asimov orange, too. Provided you played it on the Atari, because the Commodore could only display 16 colours, and several of those were variants of “mud”.

Anyway. The years rolled by. I got older and smellier. Graphics evolved too, and eventually pixels got smaller, colour resolution got larger, and games usually no longer looked as rough as a badger’s arse except when done intentionally by ever increasing ranks of indie developers either looking for a nostalgia trip or, like me, unable to employ a proper artist and therefore using low res pixel graphics to excuse crappy programmer art. We came to expect our game worlds to look decent. Nice even.

Then one day a decade ago something happened for the first time, for me. I was playing “Oblivion” on the Xbox 360, riding along on my horse on a path overlooking the Imperial City, and it just looked so lovely I felt compelled just to stop, get off my horse and stand there for a while taking in the view. I think it marked some kind of transition for me, transforming the environment from just being a space where the action took place to… well, the kind of place that you actually want to just stop and gaze out at for a while because it’s beautiful. Somehow this new appreciation of the beauty of the game world made it feel more like you’d been there. And just like in real life when you go to a nice place, sometimes you feel like taking a picture or two to show your mates. I think the first game that turned me into a digital-world photographer was Skyrim, again thanks to Bethesda. I have no end of pictures taken, usually of the scenery and my minotaur companion.

And to return to the subject at hand, nothing has had me getting my virtual camera out quite so much as No Man’s Sky. That is because one of the things they got absolutely, massively right in NMS is nailing that sci-fi book cover look absolutely perfectly. I mean check out that Asimov cover from earlier

and compare this view of a planet I was on a few nights ago.

The difference being, of course, that the second image isn’t one of some static artwork; that’s an actual place I can spend time in. I can climb those distant mountains if I want to. I can hike around looking for even more spectacular views and a lot of the time when I am playing NMS that is exactly what I am doing. It really is quite astonishing how well they have nailed the sci-fi artstyle. Sometimes I’ll just be stopped gawping at a particularly nice view and as if on cue a flight of sleek starships will perform a perfect flyover, leaving pastel contrails in the Raleigh Chopper purple sky. You could pretty much take any random frames from this game in play, slap an Asimov or Psygnosis logo on top and it’d look authentic. Making every second of your gameplay look like proper sci-fi art is pretty damn amazing. Photo-realistic it certainly isn’t but it was never intended to be. It does what they intended it to do gloriously well. I mean look at this stuff.

There’s that lovely Asimov orange again. Or perhaps you would prefer a more Roger Dean style of planet? Check out the lovely planet of God’s Cow:

Which would have looked lovely on the cover of a Yes album or some Amiga software box.

Some have said that they feel that there isn’t enough variety in the planet generation stuff, and indeed there are a few areas where I think it could be improved aesthetically – having poles with associated different climatic conditions might be nice, and planets would look a bit less samey from a distance if there were features more like the oceans and distinct continents of our own planet. I do think, however, that people perhaps underestimate how difficult it is to make procedural stuff that is both (a) nice looking and (b) widely variable. In a lot of proc stuff you tend to find that niceness occurs in fairly locally constrained clusters and that there are vast tracts of parameter space where things look at best rough and at worst fugly. The designers of the game had to work within certain constraints, throttling back the raw RNG and constraining the proc output so that the planets produced are at least reasonable-looking and also practical to get around on. Sure, you’ll probably go through times during gameplay where you see a few relatively barren rocks one after another, and some elements are common to all planets for reasons of gameplay (if the various mineral-providing features of each world were different everywhere you went it’d make for much slower gameplay having to scan and identify everything anew at each landing).

When you really look at them though there’s beauty and variety even on the bare, rocky worlds; for me part of the gameplay is looking for and finding that beauty in wherever I end up. The places themselves, and the near infinite variety in them (albeit subtle at times) is part of what keeps me playing this game every day. The bits of lore scattered throughout the planets are nice, and I enjoy coming across some monument or other and gently learning more about the history of the three races in the galaxy, learning bits of their languages, gradually expanding the capacity of my ship and exosuit and accumulating space quid by rinsing planets of vortex cubes and albumen pearls and woe betide any sentinels that come between me and my loot. That stuff’s ok, and certainly I would not complain if more of it is added later, reactivating some of the unused objects we see from time to time in the game, fleshing out the endless worlds with more of the kind of game structure that many people expected from the game in the first place.

For me though I suspect I’ll still keep on coming back even once I’m a space millionaire with the best ships and a flawless knowledge of all three cultures and their languages, simply because I’ve come to enjoy the places so much.

When I fire up the ps4 at the end of the day and climb in my ship I’m not so much off out there in search of space battles and galactic quid. It’s more like going out into the countryside for a walk. I want to find out what the sunsets are like on the next planet. Maybe I’ll even meet some cool beasts, or maybe it’ll be those ones that look like someone stuck bits of a lizard, a chicken and a cow together, and asshole crabs again. Whatever. Wherever I go I enjoy going for nice long walks, looking for the beauty in it, usually finding it too, even on at first unpromising planets. Even the bare rocky ones have their own beauty, and after a run of those it makes it even nicer when you come across somewhere lush and full of life where you just feel like chilling out for a good while before the next hyperjump takes you away.

In the end I’m not so much a galactic trader or a pirate or anything like that; I’m more of a space tourist hopping from system to system looking for the coolest sights, taking virtual pictures to send back to my mates in the real world. The simple core game loops are just a framework to hold everything gently together as I wander from planet to planet looking for the coolest mountains, the loveliest vista against which to park my ship and take a ship-selfie against the sunset. Most of my gameplay is as chilled and empty of structure as the act of going out for a wander in the woods after Sunday lunch. And that’s perfectly OK. A game doesn’t have to be absolutely ram-packed with missions and constant excitement to be relaxing and enjoyable. Sometimes even though you’ve rinsed all the story-context out of a game environment you keep on going back there simply because you like how the place feels. Trust me, I know, having played the same game of Animal Crossing for four years straight a few years ago (I only stopped when Chevre left because after all what is life without Chevre?). And what I’m ultimately getting out of NMS is just that, a nice comfortable place I can go to and enjoy nice walks and pretty sights for a little while before I go to bed.

Do I wish there was more to the traditional gameplay elements? Well yes, I do think it’d be cool to have more lore stuff in the world, more dynamic between the races involved, more of the kinds of things that all those moaning people complain about. But then again I wasn’t really expecting a huge amount of that stuff anyway – the impression I got of the game pre-launch is that it’d likely be something like European Truck Simulator set in a Roger Dean universe, and that’s pretty close to what we got. It’d certainly be nice if, having set the stage, HG now go on to fill things out with more trad gameplay things to help the game appeal to more people. Can’t say I’m that bothered about multiplayer to be honest, the last thing I’d want is griefers invading my nice peaceful galactic Sunday walk simulator.

People have also moaned about the price, and I guess if you bought it and the lack of a lot of structured gameplay upset you then it wasn’t fifty quid well spent (maybe don’t pre-order and wait to see some reviews before dropping that kind of loot next time?) but for me, judging by the number of hours played I think the only thing I have more time logged on is Skyrim, which also cost me £50. So I don’t begrudge them that, and in fact people shouldn’t be reluctant to set decent price points for stuff anyway or we’ll end up with a situation like the App Store where it’s all a radioactive waste of F2P and only a few lumbering monsters survive with everybody else dying an agonising death, and we don’t want that.

As for me I’ll doubtless be continuing to take my nightly excursions ere bed, looking for that perfect sunset, that weirdest beast. I bumped into the Flying Spaghetti Monster last night.

I was blessed by His Noodly Appendages.

Anyway I see this question coming up a lot in my twitter stream so I thought I’d post a reply here that I can link to when it comes up.

We spent two years doing games on iOS and in the end we stopped doing them because the income generated from them was so tiny that it ended up actually costing *us* money. Despite excellent reviews both by users and on relevant gaming websites, and notwithstanding the sheer number of iOS devices out there which would, you might think, make it viable for even stuff slightly off mainstream to find enough of an audience to comfortably sustain them, this proved not to be the case and we couldn’t in any way justify carrying on with it.

Which is kind of sad, because I actually rather enjoyed the work. The hardware was nice to work with and well suited to the kind of games I like to do, and I enjoyed the challenge of overcoming the difficulty of doing decent controls on a touchscreen and making something you could happily play on a phone or tablet. In fact to this day the only other thing I play on my phone apart from the contents of my Llamasoft folder is Scrabble.

To give some idea of just how awful iOS was for us, the first non-iOS game I did after spending two years on iOS, released on a Sony handheld that many describe as being “obscure”, generated literally *thousands* of times more income for us than two years and ten games on iOS with its potential billions of users. In the face of that I would have been absolutely daft to spend any more time at all on iOS.

So we quit developing for iOS, but for a few years we still paid the yearly developer fee just so that the games would remain up in the App Store. Not because we were making any money from them (towards the end I’d made pretty much all of them free anyway, since as we weren’t getting any income from them I didn’t see why people shouldn’t just be allowed to take them if they wanted).

Then halfway through the iPhone 6 life cycle we started to hear that newer phones were not working well with some of the games and they were crashing. And the thing is by now we don’t have any working Macs left to do development work on, and we’d effectively have to upgrade stuff and buy new Apple kit to test on and spend time going back and reworking all the games to make them work again and… given just how little we got out of them in the first place, and how skint we are and committed to other work, we just can’t justify supporting them any more. So this time when the dev license came up for renewal we let it lapse. Over time the games are only going to get more broken relative to newer hardware anyway and I didn’t want to leave stuff up there that people would download and increasingly find to be crashy and broken.

I realise it’s not ideal and must be annoying if you have a folder full of our stuff and it disappears when you get a new phone, and I’m sorry that it works out like that, but we simply don’t have the resources to support these games indefinitely on a constantly changing platform like iOS.

My recommendation if you really love the games that much and want to keep them around is to take an old iOS device you have upgraded from – the games should run well even on hardware as old as the old iPhone 3s – jailbreak it and download the games from some pirate site for free with my blessing.

Failing that get ahold of a cheap-ass Android tablet – even the cheapest and assiest out there should have sufficient oomph to run those games in this day and age – and take the free .apks that we have put up for our Android ports of five of the iOS games on this site.

In the end we’re sorry that it’s come to this. The sad thing is that if only there’d been a few more users, if only we’d been able to charge a couple of quid instead of a pittance, I could have been quite happy doing more of those little games indefinitely. I really enjoyed the short turnaround time on projects and being able to work on fun little designs that fit well on the platform. I never really expected to get Angry Birds rich or anything, I would have been quite happy just to get by, but in the end mobile these days seems to be all-or-nothing, with most developers falling to the “nothing” side of the divide, and not much room for that middle ground I was looking for.

Anyway, I really ought to blog a bit more often, it has been ages. And we are doing some fun stuff, and there could be something else good happening too that I can’t say more about just now, but soon.

So hopefully I shall blog more soon .

- We are going to release certain things as “donationware”. What that means is that you can download them in full, use them in a completely unrestricted and DRM free fashion, and then if you like them, you can pay us whatever you like through a donation. This is very close to the old idea of “pure” shareware which we espoused back in the days of Llamatron. We figure this is a nice, fair way to distribute some goodies that were never released, and other things that if sold via conventional App Store means would bring in next to bugger all.

We’ve begun this process with the release of the Android version of “Gridrunner”. You can download it from the donationware page, install it on your Android device, and make sure that it runs nicely and that you enjoy it. If you do, then you can donate whatever you want to us.

The donation page is open for nonspecific donations too, so if you just like us and feel that we’ve done some nice work over the years and want to show support, you can bung us a curry that way too. It’s all good, and keeps us happy and working and hay in the mouths of the sheepies .

Over the coming weeks and months we have more items that we’ll be adding to the donationware page, some of which are quite rare and never saw release for various reasons. One of these in particular is quite special; one of the best things we’ve ever made.

The donationware page has been up for a few days now and we’ve had a fair number of donations already; we’d like to thank everyone who has already donated. Thanks guys, it really is appreciated.

Visit our new Donationware page right here!

- Secondly, we are happy to announce that we have just begun work on a new game for the Playstation Vita. I’m very grateful to Shahid Ahmad at Sony for the opportunity; he’s a man on a mission to bring a ton of indie talent to the Vita and we’re fortunate enough to have been invited to the party. And cheers to Gary Liddon from Ruffian, who gently nudged us in the direction of this exciting opportunity.

19 years ago saw the release of one of the best games Llamasoft ever made, a game which came to be recognised as one of the best games on an entire system – Tempest 2000 on the Atari Jaguar. I’ve often thought that one day I would like to revisit that game and do some kind of an updated version on modern hardware.

We’ve had a couple of cracks at it before, it’s true, but neither of them quite managed to achieve the same level of greatness as the original. T3K for the Nuon was in its own way remarkable, given that it was built using shader-like techniques (doing significant per-pixel computations) before shaders even existed, in software, on a 54 MHz CPU. But that game never achieved its full potential given that the NUON chip that it ran on only ever had very limited distribution, and the resolution and framerate were never quite what I hoped they would be.

Then there was Space Giraffe on the X360 and PC – still in my opinion one of the best things we’ve ever made, and a game that pushed boundaries by making sensory overload an integral part of the game’s difficulty. For those players that got what we were trying to do, SG could be an almost transcendental experience, and those people who love it REALLY love it. In that I still feel that we succeeded admirably. But I also have to admit that the game was divisive; some people didn’t like the complete immersion in eyeball-searing psychedelia and the gameplay modifications that made it not quite the pure shooty T2K upgrade that the initial look of the game seemed to promise.

In considering what we could do on the Vita I was thinking about the various things we’ve done with Gridrunner over the years. Super Gridrunner on the ST and Amiga, Gridrunner++ on PocketPC, Gridrunner Revolution on the PC – all good games without a doubt, each more complex than the next. But the best version? I think that’s the recent iOS (and now Android) version. To make that I went back to the core design of the game, and made a new version in that same spirit – modern enough to be satisfying to today’s players, but true to the design of the original game.

And so that brings us to our new project – TxK on the Playstation Vita.

We’re going to base it on the essence of the original T2K. It’ll be the pure, straightforward shooter that maybe you hoped for when you first saw Space Giraffe. We’re not going to overload you with ultra psychedelia, but we will make it fluid and colourful and awesome-looking on the Vita’s delicious, vibrant OLED screen. We’re going to give you a perfect treat for your eyes, ears and thumbs with a modern extrapolation of one of the best shooters ever made on hardware that’s just perfectly suited for it, and in a way that retains the purity of the original design.

It’s going to be *awesome* .

Thanks again to Shahid and his team for making this happen and getting us all set up and ready to rock so smoothly. Looks like we’ve got a busy summer ahead but it’s totally going to be so worth it.

We also plan on doing a bit of a development blog as we go along, so watch out for that. I’ll link it up when we make the first entry.

But right now it’s back to the devkit for me!

Anyway. Although I joined Facebook years ago until recently I’ve probably only ever logged into it about three times. I just never got into the habit of it. Consequently I’ve had a ton of stacked up friends requests there for ages, and rather than appear rude and exclusionary I’m making a point of going back and acknowledging those and maybe even now and again I’ll try to post something on Facebook just to have a presence there. I’m already too much of a hermit these days as it is.

So just recently I’ve had the FB page open in a tab in Chrome and I’ll occasionally look at that. And the other morning I was on the other computer (my development Mac mini, which is hooked up to my iPads) trying out some stuff in the Goatup 2 level editor. I had my usual complement of stuff open on the PC, including Chrome, although I wasn’t looking at the FB page. So I’m sat there with the editor and I hear some notification sounds coming from the PC. I’m busy so I ignore them for now, I’m not expecting any urgent communications on a Saturday morning. After 5 minutes or so they stop.

A few minutes later I finish with the GU2 editor and check Chrome to see what was making the noises, turns out it’s Facebook. And there’s a chat window thingy, and in that chat window thingy is the following bizarre… I can’t call it an “exchange” as I wasn’t actually there at the time. But there is a most peculiar little drama that played out, in which I am the villain. Observe…

OMG
THE Jeff Minter
/me prostrates like a tired LLama
you probably get this a lot
but why was your Xbox360 visualisation so lame?
no yaks or llamas to be seen.
i guess it was on your contract, no llamas or yakz plz we microsoft.
working for any other big corporation since then, Mr. Minter?
there’s plenty to choose from
and they ALL want clever hackers in their projects.
don’t blame ya.
still, if you are just gonna sit there, “listening” to me this is a waste of time, right?
I might as well block my ultimate hero of code along with Hokuto Force and Genesis.
You’ll be one big family on the same blacklist.
Congratulations.
Screened, Marked, Blocked, Over.
You really should pay more attention to your fans, Mr. Minter.
/me shakes head

/me shakes head, indeed. From hero to zero and I wasn’t even there.

I guess people have different ideas about social media. Me, I consider it to be asymmetric most of the time: I don’t feel that I am urgently required to reply to tweets, or something someone said on IRC, or stuff on Facebook, until I feel I have time and the inclination to look at those things. Yes, it’s nice if people want to stop by and say hi and especially if they’ve something nice to say that’s cool, but to get the hump about not receiving a reply THIS INSTANT is a bit daft. Surely a normal response would just be to assume I was AFK and try again later or something. I’d hate to be out shopping if this guy came round to visit; on getting no reply to the doorbell he’d likely burn your house down.

Anyway, there’s my little bit of weekend weirdness in an otherwise fairly mundane weekend – how I got blocked from talking to a complete stranger I’d never said a word to, thanks to the wonders of Facebook.

Space Giraffe.

A game two years in the making, during the production of which I came as close to a nervous breakdown as I ever care to get. A game whose return for the investment of time and effort was so low that we would actually have been better off not bothering doing anything at all and instead been taking the dole, or heroin or something. A game whose production left us pretty much completely skint, in a situation where we can no longer engage in much that is experimental or in fact do anything much at all except run frantically on the iOS treadmill, and as a result left me prone to bouts of abject depression that mean I haven’t listened to any music for five years, find it difficult to connect with my family and am out of touch with my old mates from back in the day, even though I’d actually quite like to see them again one day.

And yet.

Still the best thing we’ve ever made, and the culmination of a life’s work. I’m still incredibly proud of what we made and what we tried to do.

It’s a game that cost me a lot. But it doesn’t have to be the same for you!

The PC version of Space Giraffe (which is the excellent, higher-rez version with the optional kinder, gentler level set for those who are afeared of the full-on psychedelic onslaught of the original) has been included in the latest Bundle In A Box, “Deep Space”. It’s in highly illustrious company too, with other excellent deep-space shooters.

The official lineup of the bundle is as follows:

-Death Ray Manta (PC/Mac)
-Llamasoft’s demented Space Giraffe (PC/Steam)
-frenetic space-combat sim The Wreckless (PC/Mac/Desura)
-surreal RPG/adventure Dark Scavenger (PC/ Mac/Desura)
-the official remake of the Commodore 64 classic Armalyte (PC).

Paying above the average price will allow gamers to enjoy three more excellent games and a selection of interactive Armalyte extras. Said games are:

-stunning space-shooter Sol: Exodus (PC/Steam/Desura)
-just released 2.5D arcade offering Miner Wars Arena (PC/Mac/Desura)
-humorous platformer RobotRiot (PC/Mac/Desura).

The bundle is available on a Pay What You Like basis, with the only limitation being that the minimum price is a puny 99 Earth cents!

Now if that’s not an invitation to get your deep-space blasting trousers on I don’t know what is .

So come on – get the game that nearly broke me, at a price that certainly won’t break the bank! And get a whole load more excellent games too, so even if you end up hating Space Giraffe and me and think I was a pretentious smeghead for even daring to emit such a thing – you still win anyway .

So come on, support a bunch of indie devs and cheer me the fuck up by getting the Deep Space Bundle at Bundle In A Box!

DEEP SPACE BUNDLE IN A BOX – CLICK THIS LINK NOW!

DO EET!

To kick off here’s one which predates Llamasoft itself.

This is “Rox II” (I am not sure if there was ever a Rox I – probably not, I suspect I just added the number to sound cool. Certainly it’s hard to imagine an even more primitive predecessor. I do remember me and my dad playing this quite a lot in the December of 1981. It’s not even graced with any UDGs and is just made out of stock Vic 20 “graphics characters”. You have a little base on a “lunar surface” and “rox” fall down; your mission is to launch shots in one of three possible directions to try and shoot them before they hit the ground (or your base). If the ground was entirely breached or your base got hit (more usually) then it was game over.

Pre-Llamasoft I did do a little collection of games which were sold briefly as a package for about a fiver by my old brief publisher DK’Tronics for whom I’d done some ZX81 work and with whom I parted on not the best of terms after a dispute over royalties for the DK’Tronics Graphics ROM on the ZX81. For that reason the games weren’t sold for that long and the package is quite rare (I don’t even have all the games from it myself).

There is a slightly tarted up version of the same game called ‘Rox III” which I present here as well:

This was an “extended mix” for the 8K Vic which added UDGs and slightly fancier presentation. Llamasoft never sold this version to my knowledge so I guess it was probably part of the same package sold through DK’Tronics, as an optional version for people with the 8K Memory Expansion in their Vic. As well as the “improved” graphics there was an extra little segment every 4th wave where you had to shoot bombs dropped from a mothership, which you don’t get to see in the video as I died due to mis-triggering my smart bomb.

Next up is possibly the longest lived game I’ve ever done:

“Deflex V” (again with the arbitrary numbering system). The first version of Deflex was made on the Commodore PET while I was still at sixth form college in 1979, and the latest version is out on iOS, so it’s a game with a long history. It’s about as sparse looking a game as it’s possible to make on the Vic, with the graphics consisting of nothing more than a blob, a number, and the “bats” made out of diagonal lines. Nonetheless it’s still actually kind of fun to play. We did do a much fancier version on the Speccy and a not particularly great looking version on the Atari 800.

Next is a game which surely everybody who ever had a home computer with BASIC in must have made:

“3D Labyrinth” (alas, no minotaur). Once again written entirely in BASIC with just a smattering of UDG work to tart it up a little, this game would have benefitted greatly from a little dab of machine code to speed up the drawing of the view. Nonetheless it wasn’t too awful to play as you could kind of buffer up keyboard commands and then let it catch up while you thought about what to do next.

If you want to see a really bad 3D Maze game done by me then you should look for “3D3D Maze” on the ZX81. The idea of it was quite cool (the maze was a cube, and you could go through holes in the floor and ceiling as well as left and right) but it was balls-achingly slow making it pretty much impossible to play by creatures with metabolisms that run on a normal human timescale.

This game was sold by Llamasoft for a while but like all the early BASIC games we did, when I started making full machine-code games the old BASIC ones looked a bit shabby in comparison and as things moved on they got quietly dropped from the cattle-logue.

Next let’s look at “Rat Man”.

This is quite a rare Llamasoft game, for the reason that it really wasn’t that good when it came down to it. It was heavily outclassed in short order by later releases and so it was only ever mentioned in the first three Llamasoft ads. You take the part of a chap with a large hammer and your task is to wander left and right with a lurching gait and smash the crap out of any rats. The rats kind of queue up on the floor waiting patiently to be smashed. If one is lucky a travelling hole will pass beneath him and he’ll get to exist safely down below as a Pointy Stick Rat, poking a pointy stick up every now and again in the hope of catching a particularly dozy player unawares. (The pointy stick dudes were more or less lovingly stolen from “Uniwar S”, which at the time was the table top game in residence at the Hinds Head in Aldermaston, to which me and the Baughurst Piano Wizard would frequently retire for Guinness and gaming. They had a tabletop game in there that was changed every few months and was usually something a bit peculiar – I remember playing UniwarS, Checkman and Zaccaria Scorpion there).

Incidentally I just watched a Youtube video of Kim Jong-un looking at things this morning (he sure does have to look at a lot of things; it’s hard work being a god-leader I guess) and at one point he was looking at an arcade, and in that arcade they had those old tabletop games. I never thought I’d be envious of something from North Korea, but I do miss those old tabletop games in pubs, they were ace.

But anyway, Ratman tended to be a bit boring to play and was just a bit clunky compared to newer titles and so he was retired a few months after he was born.

Ironically enough one of my brothers has a pest control business and therefore actually *is* a rat man. He now has other people to do all the actual work for him and spends most of his time going on holiday. I sometimes wonder if I’d've been better off doing something like that instead of games, being as how my illustrious career has left me skint and abjectly scrabbling on the iOS treadmill desperately just to try to have enough to continue existing. I haven’t had any disposable income for over five years.

But anyway.

Next up in our villains’ lineup of early BASIC Vic 20 games is “Headbanger’s Heaven”.

This is a variant of a game that was popular back in prehistory, usually called “Moneybags”. A guy has to walk back and forth at the bottom of the screen to collect moneybags. He passes underneath three bunkers while projectiles fall down, eroding the bunkers and killing him if he gets hit. You survive as long as possible and grab as much swag as you can.

To spice up this basic formula I made it so that your guy was a “heavy metal nut” who actually enjoyed a bit of pain. He could (and should) take hammer blows to the head in order to increase a bonus multiplier that was applied to moneybags retrieved and hammer blows taken. Bigger bonuses would therefore accrue to the player who maxed out the pain meter – but too much pain would kill the player. At any time you could headbutt an aspirin and remove all the pain, resetting your bonus multiplier. So there was a risk/reward dynamic in there which a skilled player could exploit.

The game was actually kind of fun, but like all the BASIC games tended to suffer from sluggish controls and just wasn’t up to scratch when the likes of Gridrunner and Matrix started to appear, so was only ever on sale early in Llamasoft’s existence.

Finally here’s a game which I had genuinely forgot ever existed.

This is “Space Zap” which was made as part of that bundle of DK’Tronics games I mentioned at the start of this entry. I really had forgotten all about it until a few years ago when I was trawling through Gamebase on the Vic. At first I thought the character set looked familiar, but thought not much more of it since stealing of character sets was rife anyway. Then on the third page of instructions I saw a little llama and it triggered off distant memories of this game.

There was an arcade game called Space Zap that I’d read about in a book but never played or even seen. That game inspired this one I made for that DK’Tronics game pack. You have a turret in the middle of the screen containing a llama, ships fly in one at a time and eventually attack, you have to aim your turret and time a laser blast to zap the enemies. Laser heads get ablated away by impacts, exposing the llama, and if the llama is hit it’s Game Over.

Quite how this game came up nearly 30 years after I’d last seen it, labelled as being published by a US company called “Vic Soft” I don’t know, but as another of their games was called “Deflector” and appears to be Deflex I suspect shenanigans. But anyway it was kind of cool to see a game of mine I’d actually forgotten about it’d been so long since I’d seen it, for all it’s a bit primitive and rubbish.

And that’s enough primitive and rubbish for this week. Plenty more to serve up! Maybe one of these weeks I should pick on something other than the poor old Vic (which i actually love with all my heart, piss-taking notwithstanding).

1: Gridrunner nominated for the Golden Joysticks awards.

In the mobile/tablet category. Which is nice. However since to win it you have to get the most votes from fans, and since in fact I’ve sold a quantity of games such that I could probably comfortably remember the names of every customer, I figure that’s supremely unlikely. But it’s nice to be nominated nonetheless. I’d be delighted to be proven wrong mind, so if you feel inclined to vote then please go ahead, that’d be lovely. Buy a copy of the game too, that’d be terrific too. Get your mates to buy a copy too. Ten copies in fact. Get them to get all their relatives to buy copies and vote for Gridrunner in the Golden Joystick Awards until our entire glorious nation sweeps us to overwhelming victory, sweeping aside the likes of foreign Angry Birds and creating a swell of national pride greater even than that engendered by coming third in the Olympics, causing tears of joy (of PURE TEA) to stream down the Queen’s face and Clive Sinclair to lie down with Chris Curry in peace and harmony!

Yes. That’s what I’m hoping will happen. It’s actually more likely than selling a significant quantity of iOS games or Apple actually putting one of my games in their so-called retro section.

2: Gridrunner now available for Mac OS X!

Despite being delayed for being rejected for important technical reasons (the title of the helpfile used the letters “OSX” in a forbidden way and had to be expunged) the Mac port of Gridrunner is now available on the Mac App Store. You can find it at the following lovely link of joy.

Here it is! Click here to be transported to Macintoshly shooting ecstasy!

Plays well with keys or a USB Xbox 360 joypad on any Mac but is absolutely most sublime if you have a trackpad, either a desktop Magic Trackpad or a recent-ish Mac laptop. If you’re using the trackpad remember to put the game fullscreen.

We’ve charged a full £2 for this game despite it not being significantly different from the iOS one really, simply because we thought we could get away with it. And now we’ve been through the OSX submission process and know what to avoid (never mention the system or OS you’re running on) we can crack on with pushing out the rest of the ports. Next up will be Super Ox Wars, and the probably GoatUp after that. (All the ports are already actually working, just needing a final going over to ensure compliance and proper cursor behaviour).

And finally:

3: Gridrunner FREEMIUM (I hate that word) coming to iOS!

I think part of the problem with the iOS stuff is as I’ve mentioned before, since it’s never actually likely to appear on the front page of the app store pretty much the only people who buy the games are people who are actively looking for them; for people just browsing to find a new game it’s about as hard for them to find Llamasoft games as it was for Arthur Dent to find the famous road bypass plans that were on display in a locked, unlit cellar with a sign on the door saying “beware of the leopard”. Accordingly I’ve decided to try making a free version of Gridrunner in the hope that some more people may pick it up because FREE and then maybe possibly buy the IAP (there’s only ONE IAP) to unlock the full game.

The free version actually contains an extra mode, a “Survival” mode where you have one life and play over a looping sequence of 6 levels that get harder with each loop around. That mode is free and you buy the IAP to unlock the rest of the game (containing the usual Pure and Casual modes from the paid version of the game). I’ve also rejigged the game so that it uses only Game Center, since Openfeint is now turning into something else anyway and it’s pointless including a lot of extra overhead in the game when all I need is the leaderboards and cheevos already provided by GC.

It also has an extra feature whereby you can touch a Llamasoft sheep icon and it takes you to the App Store where you can see “bloody hell this chap’s done a lot more games and look they all have 4 to 5 star ratings” so maybe it’ll push up sales of the games already out there.

This new version is just about done, I sorted out all the IAP gubbins this last week and whould be ready to bung it off to Apple next week some time. Perhaps chucking a free version will deliver us some of the precious MARKET PENETRATION that we desperately need (who doesn’t need a nice bit of PENETRATION once in a while let’s face it). Or maybe it won’t make a damned bit of difference, who knows.

But I thought it’d be worth a try. Maybe soon the Sun will be posting pictures of Prince Harry naked AND PLAYING GRIDRUNNER and a grateful nation of cheery white van drivers will be downloading the FREEMIUM version in droves and upgrading to the full version and voting for us in the Golden Joysticks Awards until David William Donald Cameron and ED BALLS discuss nothing in Parliament together except who’s got the highest score in Gridrunner and what a frightful bugger those little ships that try and go right up your arse are.

IT’S MORE LIKELY TO HAPPEN THAN GETTING IN THE TOP 10.

So: Gridrunner, Gridrunner, Gridrunner, Gridrunner, Gridrunner!

When you go to the Apple iOS App Store and browse through the various apps pretty much all most users will see is Top 10 lists. And really as a user you should deliberately ignore Top 10 lists, precisely *because* they are the most visible parts of the store’s app collection.

This makes a position in that top 10 list an extremely valuable position for app creators, and critically this means that often the kind of apps you find there are apps that have been specifically created to sit in the top 10 hauling in money. Once in the top 10 apps tend to stick there, mainly because at that point they *are* the most visible apps in the store and thus most likely to get chosen.

So there’s a huge value attributed to those top 10 positions, and you’ll find companies striving hard to put their apps there, which is understandable. But is striving hard to put an app in the top 10 the same as striving hard to make something cool for the sake of making something you really believe should exist?

In discussion a few weeks ago we were talking about “what makes an indie game indie” and one of my personal criteria for that comes out of considering the motivation to make a game. I think indies tend to make games because they have a particular vision and want to create something that fulfils that vision, and they hope to make enough money to sustain the process by so doing, almost as a by-product. Whereas non-indies set out explicitly and primarily to make money, and it’s the game itself which is the by-product. And I like the games I play to be labours of love rather than by-products.

It’s much the same with the Top 10. Sure, the two categories are not mutually exclusive – it is possible for a good indie game to “go viral” or whatever and luck into that hallowed space, but by and large the stuff that you find there has been put there by people with a very specific money-making aim in mind.

You may ask “so what?”, since there are top 10s in all kinds of other fields too and the same thing applies to them too, surely? Well, yes – but the trouble with the app store is that pretty much the only way you can view stuff just by browsing is by going through the keyhole of the Top 10 lists. And the further you get away from that exalted space the more your discoverability drops away until you have a situation like it is now, where basically those in the Top 10 positions do very well and everybody else is lucky to make 50p.

There needs to be more middle ground, a way for people to be able to work off-mainstream and still be able to get a reasonable return for their investment of time and effort.

So how can we work towards this?

For a start, ignore the top 10. Simply because something is up there doesn’t automagically make it good. I still sometimes see “Justin Bieber” come up in the trending topics list on Twitter but that doesn’t mean I’m interested in him. You might find the odd gem that manages to break through up there but it’s far more likely you’ll be encountering stuff that’s been engineered to be there for the explicit purpose of hoovering up money.

Be prepared to dig around a bit. There are subcategories on the App Store that you can find with a bit of digging around (although even these aren’t super reliable; there’s actually a “Retro” category on there in the Games section and there isn’t a single Llamasoft game listed therein, despite LS having been probably the most prolific developer in that category in the last year and a half). Be prepared to spelunk around a bit in the less exposed categories deeper in the store away from the Top 10 honeypots at the entrance.

Read reviews and recommendations. Take note of the little icons underneath the app description when you buy one which indicate what people buying that game also bought; you may find a few unexpected gems there. *Give* recommendations, both in person to your mates when you like a game, and when you want to support the developer of a game you’ve enjoyed, go and give them a vote on the app store. (Doubly definitely do that if they *haven’t* nagged you to do so in their app. Those ratings mean a whole lot more when they aren’t explicitly solicited).

Be loyal to your favourite developers. Chances are if you like one of their games you’ll like most of them. Go buy the back catalogue. Keep an eye out for their new releases. Pimp them to your mates. Praise always means a lot more coming from the mouth of someone who is genuinely happy with a product than it is falling greasily from the distended lips of some self-praising marketing hype machine.

Basically try to navigate the app store in such a way as to avoid the sticky fly paper of the Top 10s dangling at the entrance. Everyone will be better off for it in the end.

Developers too should ignore the top 10. My mum occasionally sends me newspaper clippings about some lucky chap whose app suddenly got popular and now they’re a millionaire or whatever – and it’s true, it can happen! And so can winning the lottery, but you’d be daft to set out to make a living buying lottery tickets and waiting for your big day. Better to build a body of work, build a reputation, work to make life sustainable on the middle ground somehow. Be nice to your users by not following the herd with hateful “monetization” bollocks and unnecessary use of IAP. Work at trying to be a good guy rather than just hoping to be a lucky one. The more of us who manage to do that the better, anything to lessen the hegemony of the Top 10.

We need diversity and sustainability outside of the current “all or nothing” way of doing things and a step in the right direction has to be – ignore the top 10!

(And yes, if one of my games ever gets to the top 10, feel free to ignore that too) .