After a rather heated bout of Street Fighter IV over lunch, Kwok (one of our beloved artists – who was also featured in one of our podcasts no less) unleashed his wrath via photoshop. Specifically, one of our coders – a Mr. James Gilby – likes to use Blanka and “chip” away at his opponents. As a result, Kwok’s photoshop riposte produced the following…

Following on from the Dev Diaries for South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense Play posted by Pete and Nadar, comes the mighty mumblings from both myself here as well as the Lead Coder on the Project Lukasz ‘Wisent‘ Ziolkowski and Coder Kingsley ‘I suck at Left4Dead’ Pratt here.

For some reason I thought there was a 300 word cap on the dev diaries so mine is but a mere morsel (an unbelievably tasty morsel) compared to Lukasz and Kingsley’s vivid insights.

Anyway Enjoy my D6 Brothers… and Sisters

As part of BBC Four’s ongoing Electric Dreams season, a recent drama about the 80’s computer boom in the UK was aired a few days ago. Called Micro Men it featured the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry. Considering that the vast majority of the people making video games today in the UK is a result of the fact that both these men enabled children to get access to personal computers, the legacy of hardware like the ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro is almost palpable.

If you missed the drama first time around, then you can still watch it on iPlayer (if you live in the UK).

The indomitable Charlie Brooker did a one off gaming special last night in the same vein as his acerbic Screenwipe series. Naturally, it was similarly insightful and adroit as well as being refreshing to see gaming covered without it being painfully ignorant and/or hysterical. The show had some decent guests espousing their take on games too, including the chirpy chaps from Consolevania. You can watch it here (if you live in the UK).

The regular Jackie Kashian podcast, entitled the Dork Forest, featured Ollie from the studio this week. Whilst he spends most of the time talking about robot toys he does get a brief mention about the upcoming “In Space” DLC for Burn Zombie Burn. The podcast is on iTunes but you can also listen to it here.

Separately, his recent Roboto-chan column over at Game Set Watch which covers the more contemporary Transformers games was also posted over at Gamasutra.

So as Doublesixes? Doublesixs’? Doublesix’s? baker (God this reminds me of the Nemesis debate from Mystery Men). Anyhow, as the unofficial studio Baker/Creator of magical tasty things I thought it would be good to drop you a line now and then so y’all don’t think I am a shadowy creature conjuring things up in a  cauldron.

Many of you may have seen the zombie cake that was produced a little while ago. Now I normally experiment with recipes and inflict them on the poor boys quite regularly. A recipe or two may indeed be called for as well since some have expressed an interest in them.

Only this week I baked a fairly healthy cake made with yoghurt as some of the more girly boys are watching their figures. The cool thing about this cake is it can be made without the need for scales or any baking equipment at all, or piles of washing up.

All you need is…

• 1 carton(250gms) of yoghurt, experiment with your favourite flavours.
• You dump that in a bowl and use the same carton for the following,
• 1 carton healthy oil (or half oil/half apple puree)
• 2 cartons sugar
• 3 cartons Self Raising Flour
• 2 Large eggs
• A dash of vanilla extract

Mix it all together until light and fluffy preferably with an electric beater, and bake at 160 Degrees for about an hour or until a skewer comes out clean with no crumbs. I am assuming you know how to prepare a cake tin?? Comments if you don’t – that will be a separate tutorial.

I have no clue what other recipes are wanted, if you have tasted one of my creations and want the recipe just say!

Until the next creation…

So we are working on another patch for Burn Zombie Burn! The main reason for the patch is to support the upcoming downloadable content, but we are also adding some cool features in for free. One of the coolest is a brand new mode “Survival”. The idea from it came from one of those Friday afternoon experiments. This particular Friday I was wondering if I could make some sort of extreme mode where just staying alive was hard never mind scoring. “Survival” was born from the experiment.

One of the original versions of Survival had all the zombies spawned on fire, max speed and also with massive damage modifiers. This turned out to be way too extreme. After the designers sat down and balanced it, the game mode is still a struggle but at least playable. Currently (and there is a possibility that it may still change) the mode starts you much later in the level script. Code wise this was not hard to implement at all, in fact my experimenting created lots of work for the designers and almost none for me. A win-win situation I do believe.

Obviously there is some code to support the mode, we had to add in new leader boards for the mode, and some small frontend tweaks to allow the player to choose the mode. These linked in with other frontend changes being made, but that’s a topic for a different diary entry.

This being a first diary entry, I’m going to use it as an excuse of being shorter than future ones.

Mark Sinclair
Technical Director

We’ve been featured on the official PlayStation blog today, talking about our Burn Zombie Burn themed Home space as well as the upcoming “In Space” DLC (the trailer for that is shown below). For those interested, there’s also a nice interview over at IGN with Dave Dow, a creative lead at doublesix, with him talking all about the new Home space.

I’ve written a feature for the Escapist as to the origin of Japanese mecha games and that the effect of samurai has been a culturally palpable one. I didn’t come up with the title but it’s catchy and apt I think. Enjoy!