This year marks 30 years since I self-published my first game.

It’s a long time to be in any business.

Least of all one that has gone through such dizzying changes, and yet somehow managed to retain so much of what made it wonderful back in 1982.

I don’t regret failing my ‘A’ levels, which I’d given up one year in because I’d been bitten so badly by the programming bug. I used to feel ashamed of not having a degree and I felt a little disappointed at having missed out on the experience.

No longer. I think university is a complete waste of time for many people. I think education is due a radical makeover.

Back to 2012. Happy New Year to you. I’m excited about what this year has in store.

It’s now well over 28 years since I received this letter and I still haven’t found what my dad might have called “a proper job”, choosing instead to remain in what has since become “the video games industry”.

I would later (circa 1990) go on to contract to Virgin Games, making music for some of their titles for the PC and putting together their logo for them with my subsequent friend Alexander Martin. I’d previously of course worked with my friend David Eastman, of Conflict and Floor 13 fame, both of those excellent titles were published by Virgin, featuring my music, libraries, and porting assistance, and I’d later go on to do music for a game or two for them. I actually don’t recall what. About this time, Core Design’s Jeremy Heath-Smith heard my music demos, which were doing the rounds and impressed, contracted me to do some music for some of Core’s games. I dimly recall doing Thunderhawk, Corporation and a bit of Heimdall I think.

As for Virgin, I’d join them as a Producer in 1997, working on several titles, including the PC Format Gold-award winning “F16: Aggressor”.

I still have friends from Virgin days, one of whom I still work with on a day-to-day basis. We called ourselves “Bunch A Monkeys”, or BAM. You might even see us credited in some titles of that era…

I used a pseudonym as you can see. It didn’t last. Chris knew I wasn’t a James Kent because all the names I included in the credits list were definitely not of the “James Kent” variety and very much of the “Shahid Ahmad and family” variety.

Still, it suited me. I used the name James Kent for a couple of games before I decided to drop it. In the end, calling myself James was just a test to see if it was racism that was the main factor behind my games getting rejected. It wasn’t. My earlier games had been rejected because they were shit and written in BASIC. Storm in a Teacup was shit too, but it was written in Assembler, got me about £300 and up to Hull for a day or two.

A 17 year old being picked up from Hull station in an XR3i was quite a thing back then. It was a white XR3i, but it didn’t matter.

I liked Chris a lot. He was a funny guy, genuine and decent. I’d love to know what he’s up to today. Anyone know? Anyway, enjoy this letter.

It didn’t happen in the end, he wasn’t happy to pay what I asked, which really wasn’t a lot. I went on to do Chimera and lots of other things I also enjoyed doing for Telecomsoft.

Yes, it’s been a while since I posted here. Just because I stopped working on Chimera (for a while) doesn’t mean I wasn’t going to pick it up again. While you wait for more progress on that, take a look at the picture. I just dug that out. I have an original copy of De Re Atari too.

I sold my Race Inc BMX, won in a competition in 1980, to pay for such manuals. When I started making money out of video games in the early 1980s, I bought the bike back. Sadly, the bike was stolen from a flat in Nuneaton by a bunch of racist scum. It’s a long story. It was a very distinctive bike, and if anyone knows how I could get it back, I’d be really grateful.

Meanwhile, there is an awful lot I want to talk about, but simply cannot say in public, because you know, there are duplicitous scumbags who would do anything to make the lives of other people hell. And I don’t dig that, especially not during Ramadan.

I hope you’re all well, and do feel free to catch up with me here soon for some more nostalgia.

I got back from Dubai today. Jetlagged, constipated, exhausted.

I wanted to make some progress on Chimera without coding. So I got git installed using an OS X installer I found on Google Code. Others have referred to it, so I thought it’d be better than trying to get MacPorts going.

I also downloaded Tower, a GUI for git and used that to create my first local repository.

Xcode 4 has git support built in and so far it’s all worked very well.

Yesterday while looking for the PSU for my Parker MidiFly MIDI box (unsuccessful, so if you have any pointers, I’m all ears), I found my original, sealed copy of Jet Set Willy C64. Are you tired of me telling you I wrote that in 1984? Well I showed this gem to my colleagues at work today.

This evening I was trying to remember whether I’d switched to a more reliable assembler after starting the project in the buggy Macrofire assembler. I’m sure I did, I just can’t remember whether it was the Commodore Macro Assembler or not. So what do you do when you can’t remember bits of your own life? Well you google it of course, and in doing so, I found that somebody had actually remade the C64 version. Frankly, that’s just beyond my understanding, but good on Captain Death, that’s all I can say.

I haven’t checked it out, I’m still on a high from working out a decent mechanic for Chimera’s energy/material phasing system and getting a fair bit of code done. Feel free to download it and let me know what you think. (Oh and this guy has done a good job of giving a breakdown of how the data is stored in the game)

Yet for some reason that I can’t quite fathom, when I should be at my most radical, with all of my activist engines on full boost, I am excited about my trade. My trade? Video games. That’s right. I’m so very excited about games, about making them, playing them, learning about them.

I’ve talked about making games with a message, subversive games, but that’s not why I’m loving them at the moment. My guess is that coding is a problem I enjoy solving and something over which I have some control. It is an area in which I can experiment, ask questions and get answers.

I’m still kind of dumbfounded that I have anything at all on the screen and despite my tardiness in recent times, I have made great strides and the results of that will be visible soon.

I managed to get boost::signals (or is it the single ‘s’? I can never remember) working. I had to drag the source for the signals library into my Xcode project, but that worked just fine. I also updated to the latest version of Xcode 4 and I’m particularly enjoying the Assistant mode, but I can’t really talk about that I don’t think, so let’s stop right there.

I am really surprised at just how powerful boost::signals and boost::bind are, and I will be using them a fair bit now.

I’ve also been thinking about the design and have some more ideas on that. Happy to share too.

Remember I talked about two phases to the game? Material and Energy? Well now I know how to switch phases. I want to do a twist on “game over” – it’s called “it’s never over” – when your energy drops to a critical level in the Material phase, the game switches to Energy mode. Everything becomes brighter, ethereal, vector-like and yes, glowing and sparkly. I like the sound of that. And to get back to material mode (reincarnate?) you need to accumulate sufficient energy. Or rather, “recycle” it. Everything will get smoother, more dream-like. So that’ll be a particle system then.

[Update: 21:44 - I've just got the threshold value-checking in and I was just thinking aloud - how about if the switch from material phase to energy phase was under player control? And the phasing is quite fast and frantic. Other games have jump and shoot as "panic mechanics" - I could have "the switch" - I'm usually good with names so I'll have to come up with something suitably pretentious to describe it. For now, it's just "the switch".

[Update 22:09 Eureka! Energy gradually goes down in material phase, culminating in death with zero energy unless you switch to energy mode, in which case energy starts increasing gradually. In material phase, you use large amounts of energy for more energy-expensive moves. In energy phase, you gain large amounts of energy, but you lose material (i.e. room structure, perhaps the floor or the hull of the spacecraft) - I like this - and it could be fun if the rate at which you need to switch phase varies according to environmental factors]

• Energy
• Environment
• Reframing the past
• Redemption

In order for the game to be about the above list, these all have to be factored into gameplay. And that’s my challenge.

The energy bit is really easy and most games do a simple variation of this. The obvious example is an FPS game, where you have a certain amount of health, as do the bad guys, and shooting them, or being shot, affects your energy.

I’m taking that a bit further and turning it into more of a real-time-resource-management issue. Energy is a resource, the Environment is a “trust”. In order to fulfill your stewardship of the latter, you need to be clever about the former.

Energy is expended in varying amounts depending on your activity and on the prevailing environment.

Reframing the past is about being able to over-write your previous actions, committed at every stage, and thereby “un-commit” them. And redemption means going back in the game and fixing mistakes that would have been harder to fix at the time.