A Hardy Developer's Journal

Hello there in the new year 2010, Dear Reader! I hope it is already treating you well. Welcome after our long December slumber which was caused by many different things (that I was busy with). Among them was my determination to release the reinvented version of Frantic Franko demo right for 2010’s start and HardyDev’s 1st birthday which happens today.

Franko will get a whole, separate article soon, so I won’t divulge too much on the game right now beyond providing the link to the new demo and mentioning that the game will still undergo all kinds of tweaks and modifications before the full release in March, so any kind of feedback will always be very valuable to me, especially since I made many risky design choices you won’t find in other games. (more…)

When Linode announced their new European servers, I became one of the first to jump aboard and have their VPS migrated to the new London datacentre. With much of the Hardydev team (notably Mr Hardy himself) being Europeans, it made perfect sense to host the site somewhere closer to home.
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Don’t worry, dear reader – I haven’t conducted an interview with myself by myself.

Not yet. But somebody else did (with me, I mean, not with themselves).

Here’s Part 1 and here’s Part 2. Have a great read!

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Hello! I'm a server!

Just a note to say that hardydev, the one stop shop for reviews and interviews has moved from it’s WordPress.com home to a snappy new Server. More accurately, a VPS run by yours truly, Joe Davison. If you find any performance issues or errors, or just any problems at all then please contact me at joe[at]thosedamnpeanuts[dotcom] and I’ll try to get them fixed as soon as possible.

If you would like your own VPS then check out Linode.

As it is usually the case when I write these bits many things have changed about our blog again. First of all, I wanted to introduce new writers that hopefully will make regular appearances and help make hardydevth a better place for everyone. (more…)

I’m a bit behind the schedule with some things that I announced at various places to various people to appear on the blog, so to keep the hopes up I decided to write a quick round-up of what is coming for sure. And soon. In the worst scenario I may not make it before May with everything. Also, in May someone should come to help me with the writing in general, so I expect the number of updates to jump up as well. Anyway, back to April.  Here are the current contenders in no particular order:

1) One of the main reasons I have less time to write new articles now (and sadly this trend will continue) is that I spend lots of it on making an adventure game. On my very own. And I want it to be finished in a decent amount of time too. I already have a working demo with a big chunk of the game. It is currently undergoing some (well, lots actually) polishing processes and I hope to release released sometime in May. In the meantime, I will publish the first entries in a production diary for the game, which will bring you more (lots more) details, as well as some artwork and screenshots.

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Since the very first post the blog has grown quite a bit in content and even more attractions and surprises are already in the works. In consequence, I can already see that my production diaries and the actual productions won’t be the most prominent part of The Workshop anytime soon (although they’ll certainly keep appearing and shocking everyone). Instead, I decided that there are still many facets of gaming, especially adventure gaming and particularly the indie (and almost indie) parts of adventure gaming, that I don’t get to explore in my articles for Adventure Classic Gaming, but have an excellent chance to do it here. Expect both unorthodox methodology as well as odes to old school charms. Maybe even some in-depth conversations with the creators behind the most interesting titles. (more…)