The first meeting of 2021 for the RISC OS User Group of London (ROUGOL) will take place on Monday, and the guest speaker will be Tony Bartram of AMCOG Games, talking on the subject of:
The AMCOG Development Process
Over the last five or so years, Tony has released quite a number of new games for RISC OS through AMCOG Games, as well as a Development Kit to make it easier for people to produce games, and a module that takes the RISC OS sound system and makes it easier to do something useful with it – and his presentation will focus on the games, and the development process he employs for them.
Starting with releases in the two years since Tony last spoke to the group, when his focus was on Island of the Undead amongst other things, the talk will cover updates to the Development Kit, the draft manual for RDSP (the sound module, expanding to RISC OS Digital Signal Processor), and the new title in-development for the platform:
At the London Show in 2019 Tony released was Star Mine, a 3D-perspective space game in which the player is raiding an alien asteroid mining zone, and one of his recent projects has been to port the game to run on Windows and Linux. Part of his talk will cover that, and how RISC OS has helped with the process and gets promoted through it, and how he has had to learn a little about marketing.
Finally, the talk will move to the development process itself. With a quick overview of the many titles released for RISC OS to date, Tony will talk about the general creative process – how initial concept art becomes a proof of concept and then the final imagery used in the games; from mock ups to rotoscoping (an animation technique), drawing, pixel art, and (in the case of Star Mine) building models; brainstorming ideas, drawing on dreams and streams of conscious thought. How the games are taken from an initial concept, to the final product.
If you wish to attend you need to head for London wherever you want to sit in the comfort of your own home – because it will once again take place over the Zoom video conferencing system – on Monday, 18th January. You should make your travel arrangements so that you arrive in your chosen chair for around 7:30pm (when the meeting will be opened) to 7:45pm (when Tony’s talk is scheduled to begin).
Be warned that while you won’t have to contend with London traffic, you might have to open a door to get from one room to another, and while you won’t have to worry about parking, depending who you live with or what pets you have, you might find your chosen chair occupied, so you should probably allow extra time to deal with that if necessary.
You will obviously need a device capable of running the Zoom software, which is available for a number of mainstream desktop and mobile platforms, and the log-in details for the meeting. If you attended last month and still have those details, you can use them again this month – but if you didn’t (or don’t still have the details) simply contact ROUGOL to request them.
