Show and Birthday

It's been 10 years I've swapped jobs. It's been 10 years and yet most of my colleagues had never seen my little DS games. Working as a software developer makes it a bit harder to show hobby software to colleagues. Few of them know this blog, and those who do do mostly because of their intervention on the cxx or rongtudju categories. Most know I'm drawing things because I had some of my drawings displayed on the wall before we move to the new building.

And then a new batch of colleague joined, including one who's been doing a Flappy Bird clone on FPGA for a school assignment. They are the same generation as my S-team beta-testers, so I decided to pick my DS along at one social event, showed it to the young team... not much more than AnimEditor, but they were quite smiley about it. I did not have any ready-to-run playable demo on the device, though, and the cheese pot came in ...

That was a few months ago. Two weeks ago, I was visiting Ged's place. I clearly couldn't get there without my latest demo in my pocket. Well, not quite that version. The 'ongoing work' one, with a different tune for every world, but still needing fixes every here and there. He did enjoy it, though, and his 8-year-old son did enjoy some not-too-old version of SchoolRush. I've been told that it is a shame we can no longer catch the highest apples on the green zone, though.

Then there was my birthday, alone until 13:00 where Cyril came and play some Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze ... and check the latest progress on Bilou. And I knew I'd bring some "cookies" at the office the day after. I typically prefer to make it so people can come and meet me at the coffee machine rather than just drop the stuff and disappear... So I decided it was about time to show them Bilou as well. 

Most of my team were pleased to give a look at the game, a few of them played either 3-Rooms (.nds) or School Rush, and among those who did, none found it obvious that GRAB is GRAB instead of PUNCH. I might want to do something about that before I make a release of DreamLand... A few colleague actually tried to beat level 1 of School Rush and one even managed to reach level 2.

In other teams, there were of course some colleagues to find it odd that I do that with a Nintendo DS rather than going for Androïd or Nintendo Switch. The recent court face-off between Big N and the team behind 3DS and Switch emulators doesn't really speak in favour of retro-homebrew approach ...

Final round was yesterday with my even-younger-nephews who wanted to try 3-Rooms after I shown it to my brother for music selection approval. Last but not least, that triggered a question from the 15-y-o Tango nephew who was curious to know where he could download the tools I used to build the demo and asked whether programming was required to create new characters.