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 …


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 …


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 …


Smith and Winston Alpha 4

9 months!

It’s been nine months since the last video update. Of course we’ve been busy working on Smith and Winston. Here is the latest video:

We’ve added:

  • Depth of field effect to soften the distant voxels.
  • Complete change of enemy and weapon strategy to bring the …

Bullet Physics: Query objects within a volume

I need to preform a query of the game world to find all Game Objects within a volume. Preferably a sphere but any convex shape would be good. I struggled with this for a few hours before realising it’s actually pretty easy. Bullet Physics is amazing but sometimes simple …


LuaJIT bit.band stopped working

Came across an interesting feature/artifact of using LuaJIT today.

In Smith and Winston we use the bit package that LuaJIT provides to flag and mask collisions. The types of collision (for example world, bullet, vehicle) were hard coded on both the engine and Lua side. Today I moved toward …


First Year of Smith and Winston

I posted most of this to TIG Forums but thought I’d reproduce it here for people that don’t want to read a forum.

Smith and Winston is a twin stick shooter for Win, Mac, Linux and PS4.

S&W is Inspired by Ikari Warriors and Heavy Barrel, two …