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Over the last 6 months, I’ve been putting together plans to do something pretty radical, and as of a few weeks ago, those plans reached a head. I have now left my previous employer, the wonderful Cool Blue, and I’ve set out to work on Archaos and other projects full time, as an independent game developer.

It’s a big and somewhat scary step for anyone to abandon a guaranteed monthly income in pursuit of something which may likely end up falling flat on its face, but on the other hand games have been pretty much my whole life for a long time.

Earlier this year I held a LAN party at my house for a few of my long time mates, all of whom I met through games (most via Quake 2) and it happened to be just after this year’s E3. On the Sunday morning I was up before most people, and I sat watching trailers and coverage of games like WatchDogs, The Last of Us and X-Com: Enemy Unknown and started to yearn to be a part of this industry. Gaming is what I’ve always done, and what I want to do.

I’m now in the early stages of setting up my own business and I’m both refactoring and redesigning what I’ve now spent what amounts to many years of time, effort and planning on, with a cross-platform (desktop and mobile) release of a fully working, multiplayer Archaos as my primary goal.

The plan is still to allow players on all platforms to play together, and to switch from one platform to another (so a game can begin on your desktop, then you can continue to play turns on the train to work via your phone for instance) and to make use of the features afforded by devices (e.g. push notifications when it’s your turn) and I think in that respect, there’s not much else out there that I can find that offers that kind of seamless strategy gaming experience.

Anyway, just to give a bit of a taste of what I’ve been working on…

Note that these are still early concepts and some things are likely to change, but I’m much happier with the look of Archaos now that I feel I have a consistent style.

Stay tuned for more news, as well as a big update to this site coming soon!

First of all, apologies for not updating in yonks – I could give you the usual programmer excuses about real life, work and so on but you’ve heard them all before, so I’ll dive right in to what I’ve been doing:

Archaos is very, very slowly moving along – we’re talking geologically slow here, but nonetheless there’s still a roadmap and there’s still progress on it. My aim now is to have a release before my 30th birthday (next year) and I’ll be damned if I don’t make it!

I’ve been experimenting with presentation and so on, and came up with a little thing tonight which I thought was quite cute.  I’m really feeling the love for CSS3 and HTML5 now.

WordPress has become my new powerhouse tool at work, and I’ve been churning out sites left, right and centre in this wonderful blog engine turned CMS (as of 3.1 especially so) – check out some of the following:

• www.lovegeobar.com
• www.communityfoundation.org.uk
• www.redboxdesign.com

The last is our most recent project, and is very much not a site you’d expect to be WordPress powered – such is its flexibility!

I don’t update on Twitter much anymore, as it’s become a bit of a joke now with all of the celebrities and ridiculous trends; it pains me to say it but I think Twitter is more about Justin Bieber now than anything sensible. Alas, I spend most of my social networking time now on Facebook.

Finally, I’ve booked a flight to Arizona in September for a two week photography road trip with two of my good friends – should be awesome!

Anyway, hopefully that’s got everyone up to speed on what I’m doing – keep your eyes peeled in the coming months for updates on Archaos and other projects.

Well well well, I guess I haven’t posted here in… ohhh, ages? I owe you all an apology to be perfectly honest, as I’ve neglected to work on Archaos (or indeed any personal projects) in the time since my last update.

Life has panned out for me – work became extremely busy in the last few months, and my ever expanding role has ever expanded – and indeed shifted towards a more theoretical and management-style thang. I’ve been working directly with clients and producing a lot of exciting stuff for a lot of exciting projects which, if I get off my lazy arse and update this blog more often, you will no doubt hear about!

Another significant development is that I’m no longer a lonely geek sat in his room listening to chip music and writing Javascript – I’m a very much not lonely geek sat in his room listening to chip music and writing Javascript. I have indeed found a (dare I say it) lady geek – though to her credit, not even close to the caliber of my pure unadulterated nerdiness – whom I spend as much time with as my work and her sanity allows. I won’t allow myself to become soppy and embarrass her (and myself) but… well, I absolutely love you, and you make me a very, very happy boy. Oh bugger, I don’t think I succeeded there. Never mind!

This has meant of course (yes, you all knew it!) that my personal projects have taken a back burner in all of this. Well, I say a back burner, but I actually mean ‘have been placed in tupperware tubs and frozen’. I must say now that my passion for Archaos in particular has not waned one bit – however after such a hiatus, I’d like to start a lot of it again rather than try and work my way back into the existing code base. A problem with learning as you create is that everything you did a month previous is a bit crap – so stuff I started last year is gonna be pretty goddamn terrible now.

I will return to Archaos. I absolutely promise I will, and I have been reading Gooey Blob and other Chaos related stuff. The end of the year always proves to be a better time to get on with personal projects, and I hope to have something playable in December.

To those of you who still read this, still follow me on my similarly neglected Twitter account, I salute you – and I’ll be around more often!

P.S. Check this out. WOW!

I’ve been exceptionally busy with work, and only had the energy left to play Global Agenda on an evening – I’ve not made any progress with Archaos since the last update but once I’ve gotten this swathe of hard labour out of the way, I’ll be finishing the server, building a basic client and inviting people to begin beta testing. Sorry to those few of you who are still checking the site every day (I love you all!), I will have goodies for you soon – promise!