chrismingay.co.uk Me and my games

Oops, not so much Perling, but quite a lot of Ninjah

Wow, three months since my last post. That's bad.

Three months a go I was deep in to working on Perling and things were going really well! But...I think I must've burnt out though because by the end of July I had very little motivation and even less energy. To an extent I've always tried to force myself to make progress, but I broke. I broke big time! I went back to my parents for a few days with the hope of making lots of progress, but I did nothing at all and in all honestly I probably needed it!

So since July 11th I've actually not done much game development, that is until a couple of weeks ago. "So you've made lots of progress with Perling right???" no, barely any I am afraid, but I have been working on getting Ninjah ready for Windows, OSX and Linux.

Ninjah was originally created  for XNA with the Xbox 360 in mind and while it was possible to distribute for PC, I wasn't entirely comfortable with the installation process or the way it handles media, specifically licensed music. Anyway, a group of people who were generous enough to give their time and talented enough to get it working have almost entirely ported Monkey so it can build for the Blitz Max programming language (brilliant for Windows, OSX and Linux games!). The project is called MonkeyMax and as far as Ninjah is concerned it runs flawlessly

I had always hoped the BlitzMax target would appear, but never really knew when it'd happen so didn't think about it too much. The great thing about it is, you can bundle everything in to a single executable file which is perfect for me, especially as I am hoping to distribute it myself.

I will be selling Ninjah for Windows (and soon to be OSX and Linux too) for $0.99 via paypal. More information is available via the Ninjah Mini Site. You buy once and you get it for all three platforms as they become available. I feel like I am in some sort of limbo at the moment where I know deep down Ninjah for Windows is ready, but because I am selling it directly from my site and there's no peer review system like there is for XBLIG I feel a bit more vulnerable about releasing a product that might not work for some people (not that I actually think it won't work!).

I'm all ready to go, I have press releases written, contacts listed and media ready, I guess I just need to man up and release it! ... but maybe I will wait to hear back from a few more testers before I go... :S

OSX and Linux

I don't own a Mac, but a friend who also has BlitzMax (and more importantly a Mac) has been able to build and test it for me and everything appears smooth and fine. I need some clarification on where I should be storing save data, but apart from that I am happy. For Linux I have got it built just fine and have even created a debian package for proper distribution, but I dunno... with Linux I never quite know how confident I am about it working for people. I think I will have to release it and hope people are understanding if something's not quite right.

I'd rather not fire fight issues with 3 OS's at a time, so I will release the Windows version first, give it a while to settle, then concentrate on the Linux release and finally the OSX release. I'm leaving the OSX release until last because I am less able to fix things for it (I can't justify buying a Mac just yet) so I will hope that any problems surface for Windows and Linux first.

Thanks for reading

-Chris