Yesterday my nine year old Daughter Willow took part in a Girls Make Games workshop in Manchester and she loved it.

The workshop was designed for young girls from around the age of seven or eight up to fifteen. It gave them an introduction to game design and development and the girls created their first game using Stencyl.

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Superhot came out last week on Steam and I had to try it to see how it's evolved since playing the Oculus Rift demo a year or two ago.

The game's core mechanic is that when you move, time moves. Even looking around with the mouse makes time progress and you have to be careful to avoid getting shot in the back of the head.

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The first game from my own company (Retroburn) is now set to be released to Steam on March 17th. The store page is live and it should soon be available for pre-order:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/374780/

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I'm using SDL2 at the base of my own engine to help with cross platform compatibility at the lowest level. We're also using it at work for Z Steel Soldiers (and other games) and we had numerous reports of strange things happening which all sounded like DPI scaling issues to me.

On some machines our games would launch and appear to be clipped off-screen. So you'd only see the top left portion of the screen and couldn't select any buttons or elements that were off screen. The other issue was that the full screen would render, but the mouse would be trapped in the top left portion.

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A few years ago I was introduced to Visual Assist, a productivity tool for Visual Studio users that adds some cool features and a whole load of nice keyboard shortcuts which help you write code faster and make project navigation a breeze.

One of the most common shortcut keys I use is Shift+Alt+O (Open file in solution), however if the code / text editor doesn't have focus, you'll end up seeing a warning popup (or if you have web developer tools installed, it will try to open a website).

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About ten years ago I came in to possession of an absolutely amazing Charvel 375 in Desert Crackle finish, it was super smooth to play and sounded great. Out of all the guitars I owned it was easily my favourite. In the early days of Facebook I founded the first group dedicated to Charvel (September 2007). That group is still going strong right to this day and has recently had a surge of new members due to increased popularity of the brand in recent years, and will soon be approaching 7000 members.



Unfortunately, a few years ago I had to sell my 375, it was a hard decision to make but we needed the cash when things were tight and I sold a few guitars, just keeping two (my Ibanez DTX-120B and my Ibanez S7420). So Here I am, founder and head admin of the largest Charvel fan page on Facebook, and I didn't even own a Charvel myself!

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I recently started having some problems with my Windows 7 installation on my mid-2010 iMac so decided it was time for a refresh and full update.

I backed up my files, booted in to OS X, repartitioned the drive, updated to Yosemite and proceeded to run the Bootcamp Assistant to install Windows 8.1 (with update).

That's when I noticed a problem. I was not given the option to create a bootable USB installer. While my iMac does contain a SuperDrive I don't really have any DVD-Rs lying round these days so wanted to use one of my fast USB sticks to install Windows from.

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See that cool looking banner there on the left showing that awesome Tron inspired light cycle game Positron? Well I've been working on the game in my spare time for the past two years and It's finally nearing release!

I could really use your help in spreading the word about the upcoming PC demo which will be released on February 1st 2014.

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I'm somewhat disappointed in not getting my game Positron released in 2013 having had a fully working prototype build since the start of the year, but a lot has happened and through work I've released a few games which I'm very proud of. I thought it'd be nice to think back over the events of the past year as I thought it was cool to see Shahid Ahmad do the same last year on his personal blog.

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It's been a little while since my last post. I've actually still been trying demos but have also been working on Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force Rift which is coming along nicely.

A few days ago I received an email from Ralf Ostertag the creator of vorpX with an invitation to try out the latest beta of his 3D driver.

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It's been a while since I posted my previous entry in this series, I've spent the last few weeks working very hard on Positron and Z: Steel Soldiers. I've literally had no time to even check out any new Rift demos.

Then late lastnight just before bed I saw someone mention on Facebook that the -vr flag now works in Portal, so I just had to check it out this morning!

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A whole load of people I know received their OUYAs last week and I had my fingers crossed that mine would be arriving soon too. Just had the email from OUYA to say it's now reached their 'distribution center' and I'll be notified when it's picked up for delivery (so could still be a few weeks before I get it).

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Today was more of a development day, having been in at work for most of the day I got home and was in the mood for some more coding so I loaded up the Elite Force Rift solution and got the ioSTVEF VM compiling, was pleasantly surprised that the patches worked even though the ioQuake3 source has changed somewhat since ioSTVEF was last updated.

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Didn't have much time to play with the Rift today, got a major milestone to reach on a project at work and have been working on that in my own time too.

I did however find a little time to try out a little racing game but unfortunately had issues with it. Fortunately though my T Shirt and poster arrived!

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There really seems to be a lot more demos popping up over the past few days and not only that but some of the earlier demos are now receiving updates which is cool so there's plenty of new stuff to try.

I downloaded Unity for the first time this weekend and had a quick look over it. As a professional games programmer I've always dismissed Unity as a tool for those who aren't capable of programming a game from the ground up themselves but the recent demos I've been seeing have been quite impressive hence the reason I've decided to give it a chance.

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First, let me start by saying Proton Pulse is my favourite Rift experience thus far! It's simply amazing and is a shining example of what the Rift was built for.

With its bright neon VR graphics it immerses you in the game world where you simply use your head to control a virtual paddle in what is effectively a 3D game of breakout.

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After trying Jamulus Rift, another little demo I saw posted on the Oculus forums was a small space based shooter called Space Cadet.

I downloaded the game and tried it out. I spent a minute trying to figure out how to control my space craft before realising that it was fixed on a 2D plane within 3D space. This works well but I'd still love to play a full 3D space flight game with my Rift.

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Today I noticed a few new demos had popped up on the Oculus Forums and the Oculus sub-reddit. One that caught my eye was a game jam entry entitled Jamulus Rift.

The game is a lane based racing game in similar style to say Audio Surf or Switch Galaxy.

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Since FRAPS seemed to work pretty well yesterday recording some Doom 3 BFG footage, I decided today I'd record some gameplay from Half-Life 2.

I've not get too far in to the game just yet, only been playing in short bursts but during this 12 minutes I recorded I came up against the first few rounds of Manhacks.

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This time round I had intended to try out one of my old Doom 3 maps with Doom 3 BFG but after downloading it and dropping it in to the game directory I came up against a couple of problems.

Firstly I couldn't access the console, a quick Google search showed me how to do that from command line. Then on loading the map it gave me an error due to incorrect format of a monster model in the game.

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