Block Copy Coders

After a bit of an arduous birth Space Giraffe for the PC is all done and out in the wild

Why am I writing about it here? I am sort of tangentially involved. I’ve always been a big fan of Jeff’s work and helped him get the deal with MS for doing the X360 visualizer and Space Giraffe’s release on XBLA.

I helped a little on the PC version though oddly it was more my rusty coding skills than biz ones that were called on. It’s been a nice learning experience. I got understand the whacky world of PC graphics and do quite a lot of optimisation work, a few changes managed to speed the game up considerably. Space Giraffe now runs really well on lowish level hardware. You can get a good game out of it on Radeon 9600, a six year old card I also got to learn a lot about rails and built an ecommerce site to sell the game and a very basic CRM allowing others to update the LS web site. Nice to do a bit of spare time dev and see the results out in the wild

Anyway it’s taken a while but he guys have now finished the game. You find out all about it, download a demo or even buy the game here:

• http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/

It’s $20 which seems to be the standard price for indy games right now and offers a complete graphical overhaul for the game’s 100 levels as well as containing the original look of the X360 version. I’m a massive fan of the game but then again I would be wouldn’t I?

Absolutely fizzing furious this morning. We’re currently in the position of trying to rent a place in Dundee. Work is taking us north of the border so me, Suzey and Charlie hauled it up to Scotland to look at some properties to let. We saw 5 in all and one was absolutely perfick.

Now before starting out on this course we were warned by a few friends that Dundee estate agents are notoriously awful. The market is pretty liquid up there, properties go quickly and you don’t have be the sharpest tool in the box to lease stuff out. We were warned it’s not unusual for the agents to uncommunicative and to find a property you’ve offered on has gone with no warning at all.

And that’s what’s happened to us. We saw a place we really liked, said we wanted and then spent since then trying to get any traction with the estate agents only to find out this morning from their front desk that the house has gone. This despite the point we’d got to was waiting for a call back from the agents last Friday.

So it means another trip to Scotland and another couple of days looking round for places to live and even less chance of getting there before Christmas. My rage-o-meter is on full infuriate.

Luckily this picture cheered me up a bit