Sad news I am affraid, job cutbacks have occured at Juice and my job has been put “at risk” along with 2 other colleagues out of the 4 in the core tech team I was in. The cutbacks are a result of the rapid decline in on the shelf sales of games and therefore THQ are going down the digital route (PSN/XBLA). A more generic THQ report can be found at 60-THQ-dev-jobs-gone-in-new-digital-push. To be honest I am more annoyed at the lack of a resulting title after 2 years of heavy technology development, my team worked really well together and we managed to get a whole lot of complex systems developed in a short time (quite surprisingly shorter than was expected, and we were not being liberal with resource allocation either!). It was always a turbulent ride on the current title just like the previously cut title Stormbirds, a lot of ideas/features/tech came and went pretty rapidly within the last 2 years so I cannot actually describe, if I was allowed to, what the title would have been like anyway.

So.. I am curently seeking a new position (core technology or art tools development), feel free to contact me via email if you have any such vacancies.

Cheers,

Neil

This month saw the return of the Sundown demo party held in Budleigh Salterton, Devon, England.  Quite a few nice little productions were released at this party so I thought i’d blog them to keep peeps informed of recent demoscene happenings.

For those who do not know about the Sundown demo party held in the UK, then try clicking the link to the website in the links section of this site, the demo party has been running for 5 years now and this years event was run very efficiently and much more smoothly than previous years, the atmosphere was great, big up to the organisers for that.  The event is held over a weekend and various competitions are run just like a traditional demo scene party, both on new and old platforms.

Right, on with the production reviews:

“Ephemera” by Approximate, winning 64k intro from Sundown 2009

The executable can be downloaded from the pouet link here.

This demo is a great example of good procedural texture generation and the rendering tech is really good, these guys have been working on their graphics engine and softsynth for quite a long time and since last years Sundown they really have been coming along really well.  Only real criticism is the lack of direction and flow within the intro, this really needs to be sorted out for future productions as it does not match the rendering quality and niceness of the synth sounds produced.  It is great to see these guys improving every time they release

“Ahh the tape loading era” by AteBit, winning oldskool demo from Sundown 2009

The executable can be downloaded from the pouet link here.

Although I have no knowledge of the technical side of this demo, the concept alone is enough to make it very special indeed.  Streaming demo content while loading has not been seen before, let alone loading off tape on the spectrum, it is also nice that at the end of the tapeloadtro there are a number of Atebit classics to watch which have actually loaded.  Nice one guys!

“VIA” by Neurotypical, 2nd place in the oldskool demo competition at Sundown 2009

I was really impressed by this because it is the first BBC Micro demo I ever seen!  Again I do not understand the technicalities but it was great on the bigscreen at the party, the demo is basically a video streamer but with a nice tune over the top.  Im sure it is technical enough to get the streamer working on the BBC Micro, maybe I should investigate the platform more because last time I used one was at school so so many years ago

“Spectrumori-On” by HOOY-PROGRAM, 3rd place in the oldskool demo competition at Sundown 2009

Although there is no youtube vid of this demo available at time of posting, you should try and check it out at the pouet link here. This demo is a great journey, heavily based around synchronisation with the music playing, I was totally mesmerised during the competition and the little touch with the objects on screen making out SD09 at the end was great. Thumbs up for Gasman, because he always manages to make something new every time, whether it is on Spectrum, IPOD, Javascript.. always entertains us!

Right, that was a rundown of the top highlights of this years Sundown, hopefully next year will be as entertaining and exciting as this year was. I always feel a bit odd going to demo parties and not producing anything to enter but it was great to just have a few beers and meet up with some old friends. I did enter the ascii/ansi compo, but that was just a bit of fun. Currently I am working on some material for a demo to be released soon and a lot of work on my demotool/engine, recently added shadows and lighting is a bit better now, a whole load of architectural work on the demotool is required which I am working on now.. will report back when there is something more impressive to show

Right, thats it for this time, keep being creative in whatever you do..