Robotic Shed

So it’s looking like the most sensible way to keep developing indie games with up to date software is to transform Robotic Shed from an occasional blog into a real company. Microsoft has a programme called BizSpark that should hopefully allow me to graduate from my now long in the tooth copy of Visual Studio 2008 to the more modern versions assuming I understand the programme correctly. It was always my intention to do so eventually but I never had a compelling reason until now. For myself, and I suspect most other one-man indie developers life is a kind of hybrid existence hovering between game development and other sources of income but I hope that it is the kind of long shot software development that Microsoft is hoping to support with it’s programme. We shall see.

Corporate email addresses shall be made and an application to Microsoft sent forth and I’ll report back if all goes well.

In other news, development on Free Company continues in it’s usual haphazard manner around the rest of my life. Recently I’ve been trying to get the campaign map into a more interactive shape than just being a pan-able, zoomable image of a map. I want to have discoverable locations on there and territories that you can visually see your influence growing over as you grow your reputation (be it good or bad), enforce your will and expand your commercial empire. Ultimately I’ve decided that this is going to need a ‘map editor’ tool to do in a reasonably intelligible fashion.

Oh, and I added pasting from the clipboard into the bits of my UI where you can type things because I love doing that and you never know when it might come in handy.