I've been working on a personal project for a while now off and on. It's a computer game version of Ravensburger's "Labyrinth" board game. My kids really enjoy this game. We've got the Harry Potter themed edition but my boys were wishing there was a Lego Ninjago version. Well, it got me thinking… "how hard can it be". And of course it turns out, harder than I thought of course. My main blocker is time and patience as usual but I'm making some decent progress. The board is setup with some fairly decent artwork (given I'm a programmer and have no 3D or digital art skills)

The game has two states. The first lets you click one of the arrows and a tile will be inserted into the board, pushing out the one at the other side of the board. That becomes the "spare" tile which you can rotate by clicking the tile icon in the top right hand corner. The second state is the player movement state which I'm fighting with a bit. To find your way from your player to the "treasure" tile you need to click the tile your player is on and drag a line through the maze. The game will highlight your path as you drag. The tricky part is getting the "pathfinding" to respect the walls. It's more tricky because while each tile has a valid set of directions (up and right for example) it can be rotated so up and right becomes right and down and all the logic has to consider that. Still, it's getting there. Whether I'll figure it all out before my boys grow out of Ninjago, I don't know.

First new update to SIncLib for a while. I've added a new QOL feature that takes the micro management out of stock control. Admittedly, this may defeat the point of a management game but if you want to think less about stock control then this may be helpful! Once a product has been released and you have purchased your first batch of stock, this feature will monitor your stock levels and check if last months sales are greater than your current stock level + x%. You can set the percentage to whatever you want, say 200%. In this example, if you sell 10,000 copies last month, the mod will order enough new stock to take you up to 20,000. If you set the percentage to 50% then the mod will ensure you have 5,000 copies in stock. If you have product printers then it will send a job to the printers, otherwise it will just order copies. This also works for software that you have acquired through takeovers or IP purchases so can be quite useful at making sure you're not missing out on any extra sales! Get the mod on the Steam Workshop, here https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2885461480

My Software Inc. code mod has been updated to be compatible with the Beta 1.3 version of the game. It can be downloaded from Steam Workshop here.

SIncLib (or Software Inc. Library) is a bunch of game play enhancing tools. This is the third release and the first for Alpha 11+. It has two features currently but I have plans to add more over time.

The first feature in this library is Team Manager. This is a tool that will optimise a software team by pulling staff from other teams if they have staff more suited to the current project. So, let's say you have a team developing a game that requires System, Audio and 2D specialised developers. If the team doesn't have those skills your game is going to suck. But what if you have those skills in your company already in other teams but you don't know where. The game currently doesn't make it easy to manage staff and find the right skills and this is where our tool comes in. Simply select the team you want to optimise, the teams you want to draw developers from and whether you want to adjust the HR settings to match. The tool will now move out developers not up to the job and replace them with employees with the right skills and in the right quantities.

The second feature enables out of stock notifications for products you didn't develop, such as products acquired in a takeover or products from an IP trade

Feedback and ideas very much appreciated.

GitHub for the project is here: https://github.com/realworld666/SIncLib

I've been doing more learning in frontend tech to try and improve my web design skills. The web has moved on a lot from <table> and <marquee> :) The current version of this site is built with NextJS and Tailwind with a Strpi headless CMS powering the blog. The whole site is built and deployed from a Github CI/CD pipeline. Works fairly well I think. Probably won't encourage me to update the site any more than I have previously though! Other things of note, the site should be fully responsive and work fine on mobiles and small screens. The header graphics are all AI art generated by Midjourney which is capable of some truely incredible looking art.

My Software Inc. code mod has been updated to be compatible with Alpha 11 version of the game. It can be downloaded from Steam Workshop here.

SIncLib (or Software Inc. Library) is a bunch of game play enhancing tools. This is the third release and the first for Alpha 11+. It has two features currently but I have plans to add more over time.

The first feature in this library is Team Manager. This is a tool that will optimise a software team by pulling staff from other teams if they have staff more suited to the current project. So, let's say you have a team developing a game that requires System, Audio and 2D specialised developers. If the team doesn't have those skills your game is going to suck. But what if you have those skills in your company already in other teams but you don't know where. The game currently doesn't make it easy to manage staff and find the right skills and this is where our tool comes in. Simply select the team you want to optimise, the teams you want to draw developers from and whether you want to adjust the HR settings to match. The tool will now move out developers not up to the job and replace them with employees with the right skills and in the right quantities.

The second feature enables out of stock notifications for products you didn't develop, such as products acquired in a takeover or products from an IP trade

Feedback and ideas very much appreciated.

GitHub for the project is here: https://github.com/realworld666/SIncLib

I've been working on a code mod for PC management sim, "Software Inc." It can be downloaded from the Steam Workshop

SIncLib (or Software Inc. Library) is a bunch of gameplay enhancing tools. This is the second release with three features currently but I have plans to add more over time.

The first feature in this library is Team Manager. This is a tool that will optimize a software team by pulling staff from other teams if they have staff more suited to the current project. So, let's say you have a team developing a game that requires System, Audio and 2D specialized developers. If the team doesn't have those skills your game is going to suck. But what if you have those skills in your company already in other teams but you don't know where. The game currently doesn't make it easy to manage staff and find the right skills and this is where our tool comes in. Simply select the team you want to optimize, the teams you want to draw developers from and whether you want to adjust the HR settings to match. The tool will now move out developers not up to the job and replace them with employees with the right skills and in the right quantities.

The second feature is the project manager task manager. This lets you see into the previously closed world of your project managers and see what tasks all your teams are working on. It also gives you some control over promoting the development tasks, canceling or reassigning support tasks or taking over your marketing tasks. All things that were hard or impossible to do previously.

The third feature enables out of stock notifications for products you didn't develop, such as products acquired in a takeover or products from an ip trade

Feedback and ideas very much appreciated.

GitHub for the project is here: https://github.com/realworld666/SIncLib

I've started work on a new project. This is a save game editor for a PC game called Motorsport Manager. It's the first time I've tried something like this, where you reverse engineer the software to figure out how the save data is serialized then create a tool that can read it in, save it and modify it.

Currently the tool allows you to do some basic things like modify the car stats, driver stats etc. Basically, cheating, obviously. The project is on GitHub if anyone would like to contribute or if you want to download it, the installer is available at RaceDepartment.com.

Welcome to the new look RW::Software website. I've scaled the website back and massively simplified things. There are two reasons for that.

The first, is that the old website took an absolute AGE to load and I couldn't find a reasons for that other than "its Joomla" so I've gone with a back to basics html webpage with some basic Bootstrap layouts.

The second reason is that due to work and family commitments, any delusions I have about freelance work or developing apps in my free time are now just that - delusions. I still hope to work on some app updates if I get spare time but I'm not actively looking for freelance work currently.

At some point in the not to distant future, I hope to release an update to our "Audio" game I had to remove it from the Windows Phone store when the MixRadio API was shuttered. The new version has been built from the ground up with Microsofts Groove API and Unity. Its functional at the moment and just needs some time spending on making it feel a bit more slick and tying together all the loose ends. Basically, all the boring stuff which is why its not done yet. Fix bugs or play Rocket League? Hmmm…..

When I eventually run out of leagues to rocket in then I will release the app on Windows, Windows Phone and Android. I'm also looking at whether a Facebook version is possible. No point sticking to Windows Phone. Nobody else is.

Another consequence of me having no more free time, but mostly a result of Microsoft absolutely killing the Windows Phone dead is that CycleStreets for Windows Phone is now open source. If you are one of the few still clinging on to the sinking ship and know you're way around C# then you can find the GitHub repository here.