GameJolt have announced a contest, it open to all technologies including Java! Wonder if I can find the time:

Hey everyone!

Some of you may have already heard about Game Jolt's plans regarding an Ad Revenue Sharing system for developers. We're extremely excited to finally announce that the closed beta is now starting! We've posted more information on the site to hopefully answer all the questions you may have.

More information on how Ad Revenue Sharing will work can be found at:
http://gamejolt.com/developers/ad-sharing/

That's not all, though. To kick off the beta we're going to be running a game making contest! Three winners will be picked, all of which will be immediately accepted into the closed beta of the Ad Revenue Sharing system as well as have their games featured on the front page of the site. A first place winner will also receive a free single game from Steam (no packs)!

More information on the contest (rules and such) can be found at:
http://gamejolt.com/community/forums/topics/our-first-contest/11/

We're totally psyched to finally get the Ad Revenue Sharing system rolling and closer to being ready for the public, and we hope to see lots of great contest entries as well.

Hope to see you there!

The renderer/input framework for both Yore and Funky Football is a very simple abstraction layer. It allows some basic things (draw images, rectangles, get mouse input) but it's enough to be getting little games going with. This has made it easy for me to get some applets going over the last few weeks.

Tonight I spent some time porting that little layer over to android. It's been a long night but I now have one project which builds both android and applet artefacts - including run configurations in eclipse. There's a tiny Activity bootstrap for the android version but all the core code is the same.

There are more issues to face due to memory constraints on android (16 meg heap) and the amount of memory my AI search tree is taking up (some 20k nodes in some cases). Nice to see it playing on the emulator at least though :)

The AI still needs more work and I've had a bunch of useful feedback, so I can see this game has at least a few more days of legs on it. All in all it's been an effective way of getting the android port done without things getting too complicated too quickly!

It's playable and quite a bit of fun. The AI isn't up to much but can win on the odd occasion. Just got to do the framework port to Android and I'm set for feedback. Getting distracted with tiny mash ups like this isn't good for my main project though :(

I've just read the news that David Eddings has died. This is very sad news for the world. My thoughts go out to his family.

Those who know me know that I've read Eddings since I was a little lad. It 'gave me a reason to read'. I associate whole sections of my life and sets of music with a series of scenes in the Belgariad and Mallorean series. Moving on to the later stuff, Elenium and Tamuli, we get introduced to Sparhawk and whole new more adult and religious world. Finally with the later extensions to the Belgariad's world, Eddings work can only described as Epic.

Much of my RPG/RTS fantasy work and personal writing is inspired from Eddings. Without his stories I would surely not have read as much, or have spent the time learning about language and flow.

In short, David, you'll be sadly missed by many but with luck your work will live on to a new generation (I'll certainly be encouraging my daughter to read it).

If you haven't already, get out there and read the first Eddings series, if you don't you're missing out.

Here's a new little hack creation thing, it's called:

Game design help from Måns Olson.
Official Game Naming Expert: Dave Watts

Check out the applet on the main Chewb Page

Go take a look at Game Jolt, it's a games site that will be accepting Java applets soon that just smacks of quality and independence. They of course accept other technologies (flash, silverlight, standalone) as well but it's the first site I've seen accepting Java that:

a) Wasn't specifically designed for Java Games
b) Looks so professional
c) Appears to be gathering momentum

Go and take a look! I've already found a few flash games on there I hadn't seen before that are great. Top stuff!

Just signed up as a developer so I can submit stuff (just need to sort them out now) - I'll probably use the blogging facility over there for player yore updates I guess.

Anyway.. do your self a favor, go take a look.

Videos, for all indie games, everywhere.. so here's one of Yore in it's current state. Nothing too exiciting but probably gives a feel of the direction it's going in:

Tales of Yore - First Demo - WMV from Kevin Glass on Vimeo.

Just got back from a lovely week break in west Wales. A little cold at times but a brilliant week with wife and daughter, playing on the beach and visiting bizarre tourist attactions. Bit of photo editing on one of the snaps:

Might even get that printed for the wall :)

Believe it or not, I'm still working on a game... some 3 weeks later. Here's the current screenie:

Combat is working now, though all my party keep getting killed as you can see above. Inventory is also sorta coming along:

How long can I keep going on the same game idea? Time can only tell.