Hello, hello,

No one: "Are these things really weekly?"

It seems not. But I have been busy. Busy writing Lua and then porting to the Z80. Now I'm into the swing of things again - after several decades - I'm finding it to be not so much difficult, but more that it just requires deep, very deep, levels of concentration. You have to be 'in the zone' to code in assembly, otherwise you just can't do it. And when you're in the zone, you're not anywhere else.

So that's my excuse! Anyway, it's going well. I have little enemies running around, tracking the player, and you can shoot them dead. That's a lot of elements all working. It's almost a game. The rest should be a case of building on this. So I'm feeling pretty pleased. The aim is to have a very playable game level by the end of July. 

And yes, poor Wormhole is being somewhat neglected while this happens. But it will return.

Amidst all this I did remember that I had been invited down to Nottingham for Kickstart 02 UK Amiga Expo 2024. Organised by Ravi Abbott, this excellent event is dedicated to the Amiga computer, a machine that goes from strength to strength as it grows in popularity again. I have just bought myself a fancy refurbed A1200 ready for porting UrbX Warriors, and later, Wormhole Dungeon, so the timing was terrific.

Stoo and I were both interviewed by the wonderful John Shawler of Amigos Retro Gaming fame. I have no recollection of what I said, but I'm told it was okay.

I also got to meet the legend that is Mike Dailly. Mike just happens to be the brains behind not just games such as Lemmings and GTA (his interview here) but also the Spectrum Next emulator, CSpect. I'd guess most developers writing for the Next will be using this tool. I took the opportunity to pitch Mike on a feature to make development even easier - namely, a way to output strings to the command line at runtime. This is how I work - I never use a debugger - and so was suffering slightly with Next development. Now, a few days later, Mike has implemented the feature and it's transformed my work. Sometimes it really does pay to actually go out and talk to people.

Oh, and another great thing about the Amiga / retro scene is that no one talks about the hellscape that is generative AI. 

All this reminds me, I'll also be at the Nottingham Video Games Expo in a couple of weeks. Perhaps I'll see you there!

Finally, please consider taking a free sub to my Substack, which is a better place to read this blog.