Category Archives: Metapost

Metapost, Sprite Lamp

Steam release, new website, and forums

So! The big news, I suppose, is that Sprite Lamp is out there! In the wild. What’s unusual is how late I am to post about this, but main point is, Sprite Lamp for Windows is on Steam right at this very moment.

The reason I haven’t posted about this yet, despite the Steam release being last Thursday, is that I was hoping to get Sprite Lamp out in its DRM-free form at the same time. I’ll be doing this via the Humble Widget, and I suspect rather strongly that a lot of people would rather own a tool like Sprite Lamp in a more traditional way, rather than having to boot up Steam in order to use it. For that reason, I’ve been holding off on talking much about the release. In other words, I don’t consider it really released until the DRM-free version is out there. The issue is that because I want it to be possible to upgrade from the Hobbyist to the Pro versions of Sprite Lamp, the good people at Humble tell me it takes a bit longer to set up the widget, and that I’ll have it early this week. Big announcement when that happens, of course.

Regarding the new website, this is for a couple of reasons. The old website made use of wordpress.com, largely because I set it up way back before I knew where Snake Hill Games was going, and wanted something easy to deal with. Gradually, there have been more and more things that I wanted to be able to do that I couldn’t via wordpress.com, but it has come to a head by learning that I couldn’t use iframes and thus couldn’t embed the Humble Widget. This isn’t the first thing I’ve been wanting but unable to do with the website, but it’s the first that is an unambiguous show-stopper, so the switch had to be made.

This has a few benefits. For instance, Snake Hill Games now has a forum! This has been a long time coming (shout out to my friends at Graphite Lab who helped me out with some initial forum attempts earlier – it was only because of my foot-dragging that that didn’t happen), but you can now come to the forums (link near the top of the sidebar on the left) and say hello. I’m not overly familiar with the running of forums, and I’m not expecting them to explode into a huge bustling community or anything, but if you have problems or suggestions or want to show off your artwork, head on over – I apologise in advance if I screw up the administrative side of things.

Metapost

First post (by Finn)

Okay, Snake Hill Games. It’s on!

So, I’m Finn and I like to make games. Other things too, but most of them are at least somewhat game-related. A little while ago, I made a whole game and released it, but unfortunately not that many people played it, and I have resolved that next time I make a game I will at least have talked about it on the internet a bit before release. This blog represents my attempts to do that.

Probably there’ll be lots of different things posted here. Eventually, it will be a place to talk about my/our next proper gaming project, but it’s not really far enough along or sufficiently concrete to talk about yet – in the mean time, I’m planning some articles about game design, weird or interesting tech that I have worked or am working on, and other random game development things too. I’m interested in lots of aspects of game development, but things I write will tend towards the subjects of shader and graphics programming and procedural generation. If I can’t think of anything better to write, I might throw in some tutorials and stuff like that. I probably won’t be the only one talking about stuff here, but I’ll leave it up to the other members to explain themselves.

So that’s that. Once I’ve written something more interesting, I’ll start spreading this blog around. If you somehow found your way here before that happens, apologies for the lack of content but stay tuned!