I don’t have that many screenshots of the actual porting process unfortunately but there are a few taken during porting of Goatup so you can see something of how it works. And have playable VR versions fall out by default too. I thought it’d even be nice if I could make it so everything could be playable and look cool in VR as well as on a normal monitor, since by now we have a fair bit of VR experience and the necessary bits in our engine, so why not?Īnd so the framework for Minotaur Arcade was made – a ‘virtual arcade game’ environment designed to be easy to port MP games into (and therefore by their very nature *any* sprite and tile based games also), which would allow me to get ports up and running relatively quickly, then allow me to add extra stuff to make them more interesting and fun. ![]() Now most old arcade machines were sprite and tile based, and so was a lot of the old Minotaur Project stuff, so I started thinking about how I might go about creating some kind of framework into which it would be easy to port sprite and tile based stuff, making it easy for me to plug the old MP designs into it, whilst also allowing for the possibility of introducing new features with which to extend the designs once ported, and to make them look nicer and more interesting than just straight mobile phone game ports. One of my favourites of the old Minotaur games was Gridrunner, which I’d developed in the style of a classic old Namco arcade machine. Of course I didn’t think that just straight porting them over would cut the mustard I’d have to be able to make them more interesting in some way and polish up and extend them. But basically those games were languishing and pretty much unavailable to most people.Īt the beginning of the year Giles was working on the Tempest ports, and I was in need of something to do myself, and I thought it might be nice to somehow maybe resurrect some of those old mobile games, rescue them and bring them to actually viable platforms. Some of the games were ported to Android, and indeed free versions of those are available elsewhere on this site. Over time the games became nonviable on iOS as Apple decided that nobody would be able to run older games on newer versions of their OS, and we had neither the hardware nor the inclination to invest any more time in updating them, and anyway I had no intent of going back to mobile at all any time soon unless someone was to pay me handsomely in advance to do so. Although those two years ended up being the worst of my entire career, the games themselves werre actually pretty decent little things, and garnered good reviews wherever such things were published. The Minotaur Project games were a series of 9 games I did during the two awful years I worked on mobile phone games. Just in case anyone is wondering what Minotaur Arcade is and how it relates to the old Minotaur Project mobile phone games, well, I shall explain. We do have MAv1 also working on PS4/PSVR but the Steam version is likely to be first out as it won’t have to pass through the release bureaucracy at Sony. Both things are nigh on complete and just await final plumbing in to the Steam online leaderboards/achievements stuff and that will be happening over the next few weeks. And having finally finished that we’re working to put final touches to two projects that have been nearly complete for a few months now – Polybius for PC/Oculus Rift, and Minotaur Arcade Vol. Of course we’ve completed the ports of Tempest 4000, which is finally out on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. ![]() I know I don’t post on here that much, I guess because these days just about the only social media thing I bother with is Twitter and my Morning Sheep Time periscopes, but I thought it’d be cool to do an update talking about some of what we have been up to since Polybius came out.
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