YoYo Games Ltd...

Well, a little later than advertised.. but here we go. After leaving Realtime Words at the end of February, I can now announce that I'm now working full time as Head of Development for YoYo Games Ltd. YoYo have an amazing product called Game Maker which, to put it simply, allows you to make games without being a hard core programmer; or in fact a programmer at all. This is really neat. Russell Kay (who you may remember is doing the ZX Spectrum port of XeO3) and I have been working for some time to port the runner part of Game Maker onto the PSP, so that we can put some of the amazing games into the Playstation Network, as well as other console or mobile targets. In fact you can see a work in progress shown here..

This is a month or so old now, and we've made some real progress in speeding it all up, so Sky Diver hardly ever slows down now, which is great.

I've been having great fun doing this and hope to blog some more as time goes on about the problems, and internals of Game Maker, and what we hope to do in the future - so exciting times ahead! I'm also really excited to be part of the massive development scene at YoYoGame.com and hope we can deliver some really cool updates for them to play with.

I had to laugh... I've already been caught out by saying the PSP was uncool, so I thought I should at least attempt to clarify! :)

The cool wall isn't about what's good, or even what's popular, but what's perceived as being cool. Now, the PSP from a techie point of view, is very cool. Great colour screen, MIPS cpu (which I love), and good graphics through-put. But from a cool point of view.. well, the UMD isn't nice, it drains power too much and that kills it. When it first came out I was very excited about it, I loved the idea of playing movies on that very cool screen. But the battery let it down with the UMD drive, and the movies were too expensive; particularly for ones I already owned! One thing that really excites me with YoYo and Sony's NEW mini games, is this removes the UMD from the equation. Your battery life goes up, and the newer slimline PSP's are actually quite nice and pretty light.
The PSP Go is definitely heading in the right direction, but pricing is a little silly. If they can get the price down, the PSP Go could be a real winner; but cool? We'll have to wait and see!

Of course on top of this, you also have the minis being playable on the PS3, which is really cool. This means we should be able to get Game Maker games onto the PS3 as well, although perhaps one day... a real PS3 Game Maker HD might even be on the cards... only time will tell - now how cool would that be?