Dan Donnan

Quick-ish update. Here's the tl;dr: I've updated my portfolio There are also some new videos on the YouTubeses I've released more source code More games on Itch

While I haven't played every Doctor Who game that has released since I got into the show back in 2005, I've played a decent amount of them. During the Matt Smith era, The Adventure Games were pretty good (I enjoyed them enough to replay them and write a guide), but the paired DS and Wii titles - Evacuation Earth and Return to Earth - were bad. Real bad. I'm not even sure how I finished Return to Earth after a bug meant the game camera was in a completely different room to the one I was blindly navigating. For Christmas, I was gifted another 2 Doctor Who games in the form of the Duo Bundle for Switch. The Edge of Reality is a console / PC port of the VR game The Edge of Time, and The Lonely Assassins was a game I hadn't even heard of until I saw this collection existed. It turns out it was originally a mobile game released in 2021 that acted as a sequel to a critically acclaimed episode from 2007.

 Many years ago, I was a ROM hacker. I never finished a project, not because of the classic "I've started, so I'll not finish" trap that many home projects fall into, but because the ROM is so fragile that doing anything can completely break it and you need to constantly be creating back-ups if you want to progress at all. I've had my eye on the Pokémon FireRed decompilation project for a while, and a few months ago I decided to get started with it. Unlike ROM hacking which edits the actual game file, the decompilation project is a reverse-engineered code base which can be edited and then built into an actual game. It generally means that there's no need to be constantly creating back-ups (unless, for some reason, source control isn't being used), and it's much easier to change or add completely new features to the game.

While I had asked for a few slightly older games for Christmas, I also unexpectedly received a new release - Gotham Knights. I didn't know much about it going in other than the internet had seemingly snubbed it because it wasn't an Arkham game, and that there was a completely unrelated TV show of the same name being made. My first hour with Gotham Knights was spent installing it. I'd put the disc into the PS5, then left for a shower and came back to find the bar was only a third of the way along. I'd done the same with Immortals: Fenyx Rising a couple of days earlier and that had done in that time, and that had even downloaded a patch.

Krampus is a movie that I have been meaning to watch for years. It's been patiently waiting in the My List section on Netflix for the coinciding of December where it is acceptable to watch Christmas movies, and me actually being able to find the My List section because it's never in the same place. All I knew was that it was a Christmas movie that featured a monster called Krampus. My favourite Christmas movie features lots of tiny monsters, but unlike Gremlins, I'm not going to be rewatching Krampus every year.

A few months ago, after about half a year of weekly posts, I stopped posting without warning. Since then, I’ve been working on a game in Unity and it is functional in the sense that pressing buttons results in things happening on screen. It’s just the things that happen on screen aren’t yet the same as what I have in my mind. I’ve also gone round the houses a few times in Blender trying to get a character model setup in a way that shouldn’t be a pain in the arse for me later on. But working on the game isn’t why I vanished.