Smith and Winston - First Access

Well it’s been a long long four years and Smith and Winston isn’t done yet but it is a major milestone for us. We’re opening the game up for first-access.

Why not just wait and release it? Well when you’ve worked on something for so long …

Smith and Winston mentioned in Kotaku UK - We’re sexy!

We’re not that great at promoting Smith and Winston. It’s not finished yet, so we’re very busy, but we also know that we need to get as many people to see the game before it’s done so they know it exists. So we are very grateful …

New Year, new HUD

One of the elements we’ve iterated on the most in Smith and Winston has been the HUD. It really is hard to convey all the information in a quick and timely manner to the player. This is especially true for a game with as fast action as Smith and …

Installing MacOS 9.2 on my Power Mac G4 (Sawtooth)

For reasons that are obscure even to me, I felt the desire to unarchive some old DAT tapes that have been sitting around my house for the last 20 years. They were backed up with Retrospect backup about 20 years ago on an old PowerMac 7100/80 when I worked …

Mounting USB sticks autmatically in FreeBSD

Getting USB devices to automount in FreeBSD is harder and more complex that it needs to be. All the parts are there but what makes it hard is that it’s changed over the years so you can get yourself in a right pickle. Here is what I did to …

Merry XMas and a happy new year

We took one of the secret levels from Smith and Winston and played with it for a few days to make a Christmas style level. We’ll probably hide this level somewhere in the game, maybe it will only appear on Christmas day?

Anyway, we hope everyone has a really …

Connecting to a m0n0wall box over serial

I dug up my old m0n0wall box today and wanted to see what was on it. It’s an old WRAP embedded system from PC Engines. It doesn’t have any video out. I didn’t want to connect it to my network as it’s likely to have the …

FreeBSD 11 on the Acer Aspire One ZG5

For no reason other than boredom I bought an Acer Aspire One ZG5 notebook for £30 on ebay. I wanted to install FreeBSD on it and with and little google-fu I checked that it was indeed compatible with FreeBSD 11. Auction ended, off I go installing the best OS in …

In Defence of Writing Your Own Engine

Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the trouble makers, the engine-eers! - dazza

After reading this excellent blog from ZeroEqualsFalse I thought I’d counter with a defence for writing and deploying your own engine.

I’ve been writing “engines” for 20 years both professionally and for fun. I …

How to stick at it: Three years and still going strong!

To celebrate (and commiserate) the fact that I’ve been working on Smith and Winston for three years I thought I’d answer the most commonly asked question: How do you stick at it for so long? Some of this applies to anything in life, but it’s mostly about …