The good news is the initial conversion to Android works pretty well straight out the box, there are just a few tweaks and tunes we need to make.

So rest assured the Android app will be coming early in the new year!

The first testers are now having a play on their trusty Android phones and its looking pretty positive so far.

If you would like to test the early test version, please drop us a comment below and we will see if we can send it to you for testing.

It's even been nicknamed 'Smadges' by the community!

There have been a number of updates released since launch from this feedback, more updates are planned (one should land later this week!).

Main features that have been added:

- Volunteer Badges and stats

- Translated Volunteer badges to German, Russian and Polish (others in progress)

- New achievements to complete (eg Dizzy Heights, Calendar Bingo, Obsessive achievements)

- Statistics screen with lots of great stats to view

- Event stats to compare your event times and how you have done versus your pb at that event

- iOS Game Center boards added for most runs, unique runs as well as the existing pb board

As well as all that, we have done a number of UI updates to improve the experiance and fixed a mountain of bugs.

Plans going forward:

- Add more translations of other languages

- More regional achievements

- GPS? We may look at adding some location based information later

- Android App!

Android is something we have had many requests for.

We are looking into adding this, though it costs money to do and thus is not the priority at the moment (its a free app with no earnings made from it).
It is planned for sure but will need some time investment too in order to figure out how we do that and sort through any differences in the Android platform, so there is a learning curve on this one too hence the delays on this. It will come!

If you have any any further feedback or suggestions, please leave a comment.

The app is designed to show you what challenges and achivements you have completed and what badges you have earned, just by entering your parkrun athlete number.

It's a great way to see what progress you are making toward a challenge and records your percentage complete.

We also designed it to show you what runs have contributed to what achivement/challenge so you can clearly see which run and what date it was completed.

Will you get your Alphabet badge?
Can you complete the Stopwatch challenge?
....plus many more clubs and challenges

The first release of the app comes with all the main goodies we wanted to get in on release day including 25 badges to collect.

But, we are also working on new updates for future releases and will add new challenges to complete from time to time.

All feedback welcomed, we want to make this app better for you all to use!
 

This is in no way associated, approved or in collaboration with parkrun, this is an unofficial app.

Running Achievements is available for iOS only at this time. We may release an Android version in the future depending on demand.

Download it for FREE from the App Store Now

As development is pushing on, a story line was needed, as with all great games!

Some work has been put into the backstory now, and many characters for the game have been created based on real people from the community giving feedback on the development stages.

We wanted to share the back story while you all wait for the game to be finished, so here it is:

Earth 2080

Population reaching critical levels.

Earths resources are strained.

Earth 2095

Population exceeds sustainability.

World population decreases due to war, disease and resource strains.

Earths resources are too far depleted to recover, overcrowding and conflicts threaten humanity.

Earth 2099

Phase one of plans to populate other planets begins with a Moon colony established to aid population pressures on earth and help aid survival techniques in harsh environments. Used as quick fix for over population on earth, not sustainable.

Earth 2100

The world alliance forms treaty to allow use of nuclear propulsion in space, based on Project Orion, aiding faster space travel.

Earth 2105

First Nuclear propulsion drives used in space craft, cutting travel times drastically, especially over longer distances.

Plans for population offload to other worlds in process.

Earth 2110 - 2150

Initial Colonies established on Saturn’s moon, Titan and Jupiter’s moon Europa now space travel times allow it. Offload of population on Earth starts, but these are harsh worlds, little incentive for the general population to live in these environments.

Earth 2153

A discovery of a vast sector in the Oort Cloud with mass asteroid clustering is found, nicknamed “Sector53”, seemingly created by an unknown cataclysmic event.

Rich in ore and precious metals that can be used for trade and resource material for planetary colonisation, the world alliance plans to move in….

Earth 2154

Mars, already populated and an ideal research location for a full research and development base. Mining colony established for testing asteroid mining methods to be used in Sector53.

World alliance releases statement of intent:

Sector53 mining colonies dubbed by the world alliance as an escape from earth, with the promise of free living, health care and entertainment for all, to help build future worlds of Eden.

The world alliance moves in on Sector53...

This has been much harder than expected, so progress has been a little slow.

We have moved it forward somewhat and have a decent level of AI self-sufficiency, though a lot of this code needed to be re-written in order to advance it.

Further work in this area is really the focus moving forward, as the AI still can’t yet attack you or do much else than keep their asteroid running, which doesn’t give you as a player much of a challenge!

Much of the focus of the last few months has been on things like the sector map to navigate and move ships around. I was not happy with the flat 2D map, now this is a full 3D game.

Therefore this is in the process of being changed to a new 3D map.

This will give some nicer effects and actually in the long run be easier to develop on, as the 2D map was full of lots of calculations to convert positions and things to the 2D simplified versions.

The new 3D map makes this element easier to do by using an alternative camera and some clever bits of UI to pull it together.

It doesn’t look like much just at the moment as it is in process of the conversion.

More on this later.

During some down time while I was sick for a few weeks, I made some progress on the story line, along with a little help from the original developer of the Amiga game (K240), Graeme Ing!

He also writes Sci-Fi novels and provided some great ideas for Sector53’s background (Goes without saying we had some nice developer chats too!).

The community, including Graeme, have also continued to provide more feedback on the current Alpha released and have played some of these incomplete versions, just to give some idea of the feel and where it is heading.

From this I have added a lot more into the game, including adding in some of the community as actual characters in the story line.

Some other stuff worked on includes:

Saved Games

Load Games

Character Generation Scripts

Story Line scripts

Tutorial Level

New Music added (thanks to New Light Audio and Lemnisc8)

Performance updates and code refactoring

Many many bug fixes!

A few thanks are in order, as there are a number of people who have contributed so far and continue to do so.

So thank you all.

Here are a few people that deserve and extra thanks:

- Graeme Ing: a huge thanks to your support, development insight, story line ideas and most importantly play testing feedback!

- Ale: Some feedback very close to Graeme, helping focus efforts on the right areas

- Leyton Carter: For providing an initial placeholder sound track, many hours of hard work right there!

- JumailJ: For providing many great 3D models now in the game

- K240 Facebook Group: For giving support, feedback and further ideas

Moving forward, more work on the new map, sending ships to other locations and the campaign levels are under way, as well as more AI work of course!

A more recent Alpha version (1.15.1) was released on 31st October 2018, to Patrons to play as it stands at the moment.

There is a PC and Mac OSX alpha release, playable now.

You too can get the alpha version of the ga]]> http://www.hollettgaming.com/newsarticle/167/Sector53DevelopmentLog3/#comments_section http://www.hollettgaming.com/newsarticle/166/Sector53DevelopmentLog2/ http://www.hollettgaming.com/newsarticle/166/Sector53DevelopmentLog2/ Thu, 15 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMT Latest News HollettGaming Since the first major Dev Log, Sector 53 (our asteroid mining game based on an old Amiga classic "K240") has had a number of key updates and progress is now picking up pace.

We wanted to keep you updated on this so you know what is coming.

We have been working hard on many AI elements of the code as previously mentioned, but now things are getting harder to program as everything ties together in the background.

A lot of rewrites of code have been needed to account for this and many new bugs have crept in too!

This is a shame in a way as it means there is little to show for our efforts, however it does mean there is a bit more to the game than there was and it is going in the right direction.

Buildings available to you have increased also, expanding the number of buildings to 26.

There are many more planned, including similar buildings to the original K240 game.

Along the same lines, many thoughts have gone into what we can learn and implement into the game that the original did so well.

Some of the nice to haves with be around spaceship configurations and assigning weapons to them, having alien specific ships and buildings (rather than all the same 3D models for all races), that kind of thing.

Some initial work into adding campaign selection has been added in too, this now allows for easy to add scenarios like how many enemies to have, which enemies to allow and how many asteroids, the potential sizes of asteroids and so on.

Should make adding actual campaigns to the game quite quick later when the actual gameplay/AI is finished.

The feedback from the community has been great too. Many new ideas have come out of this like being able to play as any race, not just the humans, being able to tax the population and so on.

Testers of early alpha builds have also provided some great suggestions which we have already implemented! Feedback like this is the best as we can cater to game to the players playing it.

There are so many things now planned in fact, it's going to take a while to implement it all, so we will focus on getting core things in to make a playable version before we add extra features later on.

If you want to get involved, we have also now setup a Patreon account where you can get rewarded by naming something in the game and also get access to the Beta and Alpha builds as we make it:

GET ACCESS NOW

More updates will follow soon, stay tuned!

You can give as little or as much as you like, starting from just $1, you will get rewards and get listed in our game credits!

BECOME A SUPPORTER!

This article will show you how to add headings, spacing and tool tips to your unity scripts so that they are spaced out and more organised in the 'inspector' view.

I found this extreemly helpful in viewing my variables and objects in a more organised manner than one big long list.

As soon as I found out about this, I added it to every script!

What's more, this is actually extreemly easy to do.

These are just extra lines you add to the script, below are examples in C Sharp, I'm sure these will work equally well on other languages.
 

1) Headings
These are the most handy one, they add a nice bold heading above your variables in the inspector.
Simply add this where you want the heading to show:
[Header("My Heading:")]

Simple!

2) Spacing
A nice one to separate things out a bit, you can decide how much of a gap to add with the value in brackets.
Simply add this line where you want a gap to appear:
[Space(10)]

Easy!

3) Tooltips
More helpful to remind you want this parameter is for, without the need to open your script and read any comments you made.
This one needs to go ABOVE the line you want to add a tool tip for, eg:

[Tooltip("My Strings Tool Tip")]
public string MyString = "Some string value";

And here is how your code might look once you add all these:

We hope you found this useful.
Happy coding!

These short films are only around 6 minutes long each, but they immerse you into a strange and intriguing world, leaving you wanting to know more about this ADAM fellow.
Everyone on the comments is begging for a full film or series to be made out of this, or even just more episodes, that's how good these short films are.

Well, in great timing of the release of the latest Unity Engine "2017.1", the next installment titled "ADAM: The Mirror" has recently been released.
This shows what can be achieved with some of the great new features of Unity like the new Cinematic engine, Cinemachine but also gives the fans a little more (even if it is only six minutes!).

Originally, Unity's Swedish demo team showcased the graphical quality achievable with Unity 5.4 by showing the first installment of ADAM, at the Game Developers Conference in 2016
Chris Harvey, Oats Studios' VFX Supervisor, explained "it blew people away, not only because it was visually fantastic, but the story was super intriguing with a massive cliffhanger."

He went on to explain why Unity is such a good choice for film makers:
"the main appeal of Unity's engine is the real-time rendering, which lets film makers adjust on the fly. Literally, you could put a hat on Adam, hit play, and watch the film with that"

Neill Blomkamp also detailed why Unity has helped production costs:
"The biggest thing for me was the cameras. If you're working live-action, you have no choice but to work with what you shot six months earlier."

In this particular short film, he says Oats started the film with harsh overhead lighting, but later changed the position of the sun, which led to softer, more appealing visuals.

The next chapter "ADAM: The Prophet!" arrives soon too, which we can't wait for.

In the mean time, enjoy the film and check out Oat Studios YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD4ZEYIBnHIC2DUhiizMOHg for their other films.

Now is your chance to grab American Truck Simulator for only $10 (about £7.75).

There's also about 6 or so other games you willl get too!

Get it Now!

Again it is a rebuild for the iPhone / iPad with touch in mind, but the main game is pretty much the same, with a few updates and enhancements to boot.
No annoying adverts to be found either, you are buying the full game.

For those of you who don't remember the original, it's a transport management game where you buy delivery trucks, trains and planes to transfer passengers and goods between cities.
You can rename cities and build routes by road or rail to your desired locations.
 
Another game I lost many a day / weekend playing on my PC back in the day, it's time to do it all again this time on my phone!

Like with other ports of such tycoon games, the tabs and buttons are a tad bit small and bit of a fiddle on a phone.
Best use your iPad for this or at least an iPhone 6 or bigger screen is recommended.

Probably due to massive bias on my part owing to nostalgia, but a HollettGaming rating of 5 stars: you'll be playing for ages and ages, lots of optiions and scenarios to play, graphics are retro of course but appealing all the same, and you will find it hard to put down.

I'll try find a few more gems like this in future posts!

The game has been rebuilt for the iPhone / iPad with touch in mind, but the main game is exactly the same, it's so similar infact it feels like a full port.
This time though, you get both original games 1 and 2 in the one app, with all the scenarios of the original two games.
The expansion packs are there too, but they are offered as in app purchases.
Mind you, that's the only in app purchase to speak of and no annoying adverts to be found, you are buying the full game here.

For those of you who don't remember the original, it's a theme park management game with some sweet rollercoaster building, you can fully customise pretty much everything about your park, including colour schemes, every twist and turn of the rollercoaster, the jobs each handy man does, times between ride inspections and so on.
I lost many a day / weekend playing this on my PC back in the day, and expect a few such days to pass me by on my phone now!

The only down side is the tabs and buttons to change ride prices and other buttons are a tad bit small and bit of a fiddle on a phone.
Having said that, it is well done and not too much of a pain to do on an iPhone 6 though I wouldn't want to bother on anything smaller than that.

The iPad fairs better, just a bit easier to tap the tiny buttons with.

So an overall HollettGaming rating of 5 stars: you'll be playing for ages and ages, lots of optiions and scenarios to play, graphics are retro of course but appealing all the same, and you will find it hard to put down.

Pretty addictive coffee break game, can you beat the top score?

Available on iOS AppStore now!

We are also working on a WebGL release, coming shortly for play on our website using Chrome or Firefox!

Edit [31/05/2017] : Now released to play in your browser right here:

PLAY GAME

Infact, you could pay just $1 / £1 to get the original!

Here's the break down:

Pay ANYTHING and get:

Assassin's Creed (the original)

Assassin's Creed Chronicles India

Assassin's Creed Chronicles China

Assassin's Creed Chronicles Russia

Pay over the average of $6.58 / £5.35 to also unlock:

Assassin's Creed III

Assassin's Creed III Tyranny of King Washington: The Infamy (DLC)

Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD

Pay $15 (about £12.20) or more to also unlock:

Assassin’s Creed Unity

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood

Money goes to charity and partly to the developers, so why grab them all incase you haven't had chance to get them in the past.

Act quickly and the quoted figures above wont creep up too much (correct at time of print)!

Get it Now!

Happy GRIDmas!!

The Official blurb:

Discover a stunning world of motor sport brought to life, from racing muscle cars through the iconic streets of San Francisco and competing in the legendary 24 hours of Le Mans to drifting around the docks of Yokohama.

Jump behind the wheel of exhilarating racing cars in the most aggressive, spectacular wheel-to-wheel races you've ever experienced.

- Incredible persistent world of racing encompassing Muscle car racing, Drift racing, and Circuit racing in Detroit, San Francisco, Milan, Tokyo, Yokohama, Spa, Le Mans and many more

- Mind-blowing soft-body damage to vehicles and environments to the most aspirational and incredible vehicles and tracks all fully licensed

- Stunning visual treatment and accessible handling system

- Evolution of the physics system used in Colin McRae™ DiRT™ EGO surpasses all previous engines in terms of AI, effects and packed grids

The game is being given away in the Humble Store, so pop over now and grab your free copy:

Get FREE Now!

We got the the chance to speak to the original developer of Timekeepers and Director of Vulcan Software, Paul Carrington, to ask a few questions about the plans and development progress so far.

For those of your not familiar with the original series, it's a cross between Lemmings and Cannon Fodder.

Of course there may be new generations of players not familiar with these either, so here's what Paul says about the game:

"For anyone who doesn't know what this game was all about, it was a simplistically complex puzzle game, which involved platoon management. You issue commands to your platoon of Timekeepers by pasting symbols within their tile based world and they will do their best to follow your orders, your goal was to manoeuvre your platoon through complex terrain and eventually reach the final level where you could dismantle bombs left by the evil emperor Zorg. If you succeeded then you preserved time. It was a game that made you think, it was extremely simple to operate but very complicated in design and demanded a slow approach, requiring logical and lateral thinking."

The original game was developed in an era where only very small filesize was possible, with very little memory to play with.

Paul had to program the game and images on what would fit on a 1.4mb disk. He also only had 32 colours available to use too!

Creativitiy and forward thinking was therefore needed, which is why this became such a great puzzle game, it was simple yet highly addictive.

Nowadays, 1.4 mb is barely enough for a single picture taken on your phone at very low resolution, imagine trying to program a whole game and images all in that space!

The time has come for modern technologies to take this classic and remake it again.

"I’m going to take the Amiga classic game Timekeepers and recreate it using the latest technology. I’ve not developed computer games for some time and coming back to it (almost 23 years later) I am blown away by how far development tools and hardware has progressed which has got me excited about creating games again."

The original was highly addictive, with the puzzles and many levels keeping you busy.

The concept was to plan out a route and actions for your hapless crew to get as many of them to the transporter and therefore next level as possible.

So what will the remake bring?

"This time around it will be presented in a 3D environment with all of the amazing things available like dynamic lighting, geometry based collision, particle effects and physics. "

Paul goes on to explain "I want to include as much of the original game (and all of the original levels) into the new version but at the same time I want to introduce more operation commands, more animations and to expand upon the detail and interaction within the world".

  http://www.hollettgaming.com/newsarticle/156/TimekeepersRemakeOfAmigaClassic/#comments_section http://www.hollettgaming.com/newsarticle/155/NoMansSkyFreeUpdate/ http://www.hollettgaming.com/newsarticle/155/NoMansSkyFreeUpdate/ Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT Latest News HollettGaming Hello Games have now released a long awaited 'feature' update to the game.

Whats more, its totally free.

It adds some more diversity to the game and long awaited 'base' building.

Yes you can now create a home on a planet to be proud of, no more enless travelling from one place to the next for no real reason!

They have also added new 'frieght' ships to own, somewhere you can stockpile you ore mined from the planets.

This has been made easier too, by way of automated mining bots so you can attach them to resources and let them mine away for you.

You can also hire aliens in your base to help out.

There are also plans to release more updates, so is this the start of adding updates to make the game what was originallly promised?

Here's some more official blurb on whats added and a video below:

Game Modes

Explorers can now decide to play with different rule sets, across three game modes:

• Normal mode is the original chilled exploration experience
• Creative mode allows players to explore the universe without limits, and build a huge base
• Survival mode really changes the game, creating a much more challenging endurance experience

Base Building

Claim your home planet by finding an uninhabited base and creating your own, fully bespoke outpost.

• Construct your homestead for shelter, using modular structures and decorations, replicated from resources gathered while exploring
• Recruit alien lifeforms to help research new technology. Farming, engineer, weapons and science specialists are hirable from Space Stations
• Use Terminus Teleporters in Space Stations to teleport to and from your base at will
• Expand your base with storage containers to stockpile precious resources and rare products
• Find an even more beautiful location and you can simply dismantle your previous homestead to refund all of the spent resources

Farming

• Cultivate biome dependent crops outdoors, or inside your base or Freighter using Hydroponic Labs
• Plants grow over time and offer a steady supply of resources to be harvested
• Hire a farming specialist to research and grow ten new plant types, and discover new resource elements

This looks epic, we can't wait!

While we do though, take a look at the official blurb abd trailer:

"Through a revolutionary technology that unlocks his genetic memories, Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender) experiences the adventures of his ancestor, Aguilar, in 15th Century Spain. Callum discovers he is descended from a mysterious secret society, the Assassins, and amasses incredible knowledge and skills to take on the oppressive and powerful Templar organization in the present day."

Things have moved on nicely since our announcement a year ago.

Development is a little slow though, as it's only a small indie development team, working in spare time (and not paid anything!).

In the year of time we have had, we've been creating new 3D models for the buildings, updating the game objects and other 3D elements to start giving a bit more depth and added a lot of the gameplay code in now.

The main focus however has been on the actual mechanics of the game, the core AI and the ability to save and load all this data.

There is a heck of a lot to do before this is going to be playable, but it's core mechanics are working well now.

You can now build up a nice little ecosystem on the asteroid and mine it, as well as build ships, send them to other sectors to explore, find enemy asteroids and attack them!

Missile silos that launch long range attacks are starting to be programmed now too.

AI programming is throwing up some challenges with the amount of code needed to figure everything out that each AI player needs to do, so this part is taking a lot of time to progress.

Though, the AI can now do a bit of thinking for itself and build required buildings, ships and start mining resources. It can't do much else yet and their ships wont go any where or attack anyone, but they are self sufficient at least!

There are plans for a number of Races to pit the player up against, each with their own strategy and difficulty.

Back to the gameplay, we now have a solid 20 or so buildings to build with many more planned.

Shornsoft are kindly proving a number of buildings for us.

Only 3 ship models are ready but we are looking at getting some user submitted ships into the game to help move things along quicker.

Twitter follower @CGLuke has provided our first user ship and is already in the game! Hit us up on twitter or on our contact page if you want to get involved and we will send you some details on what we need.

The user interface is not very pretty, a bit clunky and not really how it will end up, but it's functional. We will work more on cosmetics once the game is playable.

Feedback is welcomed and don't forget to Follow us on Twitter for more frequent screenshots and gameplay videos as we make it!

Take a look at some of the latest screenshots below.