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Where are Speccy games deveopers today?

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  Where are Speccy games deveopers today? bit-naughty@hotmail.com - 2017-03-24 07:07 -0700
    Re: Where are Speccy games deveopers today? Gerald Holdsworth <nospam@hollypops.co.uk> - 2017-03-24 16:04 +0000
    Re: Where are Speccy games deveopers today? losborne74@gmail.com - 2017-03-27 03:50 -0700
      Re: Where are Speccy games deveopers today? "Brian-Gaff" <briang1@blueyonder.co.uk> - 2017-03-30 17:45 +0100
    Re: Where are Speccy games deveopers today? Adam Ainsworth <adam.ainsworth@gmail.com> - 2017-03-28 14:41 -0700
      Re: Where are Speccy games deveopers today? 1alvinalbrecht1@gmail.com - 2017-04-03 08:01 -0700
    Re: Where are Speccy games deveopers today? "Brian-Gaff" <briang1@blueyonder.co.uk> - 2017-03-30 17:41 +0100

#4342 — Where are Speccy games deveopers today?

...so what happened to all those guys? Where are they today? What are they upto? What do they do? Do any of them still code?


...and I'm also wondering very much.... Your Sinclair or Your Spectrum, I forget which one it was, but the OLD one.....where is it's EDITOR today? What does he do?

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#4344

On 24/03/2017 14:07, bit-naughty@hotmail.com wrote:
> ...so what happened to all those guys? Where are they today? What are they upto? What do they do? Do any of them still code?
>
>
> ...and I'm also wondering very much.... Your Sinclair or Your Spectrum, I forget which one it was, but the OLD one.....where is it's EDITOR today? What does he do?
>
Gil Jaysmith, the author of Repton Mania, still codes. I believe he 
develops for Playstation and XBox.

Cheers,

Gerald.

-- 
gerald at hollypops dot co dot uk
Repton Resource Page
www.reptonresourcepage.co.uk

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#4345

On Friday, 24 March 2017 14:07:40 UTC, bit-n...@hotmail.com  wrote:
> ...so what happened to all those guys? Where are they today? What are they upto? What do they do? Do any of them still code?
> 
> 
> ...and I'm also wondering very much.... Your Sinclair or Your Spectrum, I forget which one it was, but the OLD one.....where is it's EDITOR today? What does he do?

I think it's a bit like comparing apples with oranges. Coding 8-bit games tended to be quite a solitary effort - often a game would be designed, developed and programmed by just one person, graphics, gameplay, sound, the lot. Nowadays there tends to be a cast of thousands involved, but yeah, I think a lot of games developers cut their teeth in the old days. There's not really an equivalent of the "bedroom coder" these days, though.

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#4348

Well that is mainly because there are not the support programs to make it 
easy to do any more or in fact the ability for a loner to break into the 
market, unless its a niche product like we see as shareware or free or 
donation ware.
Blind games for example are often coded by a very small team, even one 
person sometimes. However you are not going to get rich quick by just 
writing for iche markets, its often a labour of love.

Brian

-- 
From the Sofa of Brian Gaff Reply address is  active
Remember, if you don't like where I post
or what I say, you don't have to
read my posts! :-)
<losborne74@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:c19b2041-5e9a-4938-9bc8-87733953197a@googlegroups.com...
On Friday, 24 March 2017 14:07:40 UTC, bit-n...@hotmail.com  wrote:
> ...so what happened to all those guys? Where are they today? What are they 
> upto? What do they do? Do any of them still code?
>
>
> ...and I'm also wondering very much.... Your Sinclair or Your Spectrum, I 
> forget which one it was, but the OLD one.....where is it's EDITOR today? 
> What does he do?

I think it's a bit like comparing apples with oranges. Coding 8-bit games 
tended to be quite a solitary effort - often a game would be designed, 
developed and programmed by just one person, graphics, gameplay, sound, the 
lot. Nowadays there tends to be a cast of thousands involved, but yeah, I 
think a lot of games developers cut their teeth in the old days. There's not 
really an equivalent of the "bedroom coder" these days, though. 

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#4346

On Friday, 24 March 2017 14:07:40 UTC, bit-n...@hotmail.com  wrote:
> ...so what happened to all those guys? Where are they today? What are they upto? What do they do? Do any of them still code?
> 
> 
> ...and I'm also wondering very much.... Your Sinclair or Your Spectrum, I forget which one it was, but the OLD one.....where is it's EDITOR today? What does he do?

There is still an active, albeit small scene.

You can still buy new, or re-imagined games at places like http://www.bumfungaming.com/ (excuse the lewd name) or http://cronosoft.orgfree.com/ or play some of them in your browser with http://zxbasic.uk/

I'm the webmaster of a relatively new site - https://spectrumforeveryone.co.uk/ and we have a group on Facebook if you're in to that sort of thing https://www.facebook.com/groups/spectrum4everyone/ - there are also other groups for buying / selling and developing modern games.

If you fancy a go at creating games yourself, you can do a lot worse than trying Arcade Game Designer (http://www.spanglefish.com/egghead/index.asp?pageid=397755) by Jonathan Cauldwell or try tools such as BASin (http://arda.kisafilm.org/blog/?page_id=848&lang=en) or Boriel (http://www.boriel.com/wiki/en/index.php/ZXBasic).

Hope this helps!

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#4349

On Tuesday, March 28, 2017 at 3:41:54 PM UTC-6, Adam Ainsworth wrote:
> On Friday, 24 March 2017 14:07:40 UTC, bit-n...@hotmail.com  wrote:
> > ...so what happened to all those guys? Where are they today? What are they upto? What do they do? Do any of them still code?


Some of them do and some of them have passed away.  Some returned to the Sinclair community (WoS) just to stop by and reminisce.  There is one big name currently involved with the Spectrum Next project in his spare time and a few have actually written a little code for fun.


> There is still an active, albeit small scene.
> 
> If you fancy a go at creating games yourself, you can do a lot worse than trying Arcade Game Designer (http://www.spanglefish.com/egghead/index.asp?pageid=397755) by Jonathan Cauldwell or try tools such as BASin (http://arda.kisafilm.org/blog/?page_id=848&lang=en) or Boriel (http://www.boriel.com/wiki/en/index.php/ZXBasic).

The other heavyweight is Z88DK (https://github.com/z88dk/z88dk) which is a z80 development environment for C and assembler.  Close to 40 games have been written with it.  The spectrum target includes several sprite engines among other things:  sp1 (sophisticated and traditional engine), nirvana (multicolour engine) and bifrost (multicolour engine).  Take a look at youtube for examples of what these sprite engines can do - pietro bros (C + nirvana but make sure you pick a video that displays the multicolour properly as some don't) and ninjajar (C + churerra, churerra uses a predecessor of sp1).  Churerra is another game framework similar to AGD.

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#4347

a lot are retired some are decomposing, others have no doubt moved on to 
pastures new.
 Brian

-- 
From the Sofa of Brian Gaff Reply address is  active
Remember, if you don't like where I post
or what I say, you don't have to
read my posts! :-)
<bit-naughty@hotmail.com> wrote in message 
news:7a9cc0e9-5a1e-4d94-a2d8-84a85d3740a4@googlegroups.com...
> ...so what happened to all those guys? Where are they today? What are they 
> upto? What do they do? Do any of them still code?
>
>
> ...and I'm also wondering very much.... Your Sinclair or Your Spectrum, I 
> forget which one it was, but the OLD one.....where is it's EDITOR today? 
> What does he do? 

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