We are a small indie game development company based in the UK. I develop games as a hobby and share my passion for games with my family. My kids love doing art and design work - this is a perfect way to encourage animation and other similar skills.
We have finished developing our first xbox indie game Flap - an XNA sprite based game. The sub site is here.
This is very experimental and all comments are welcomed. It is designed to be cross platform and I'll be working on the Android version first followed by the iPod version later in the year.
There are many issues for the indie game developer to overcome and I shall try to diarise them all as I go.
I have posted a few new screen shots and also a top level synopsis of converting from XNA 3.1 to XNA 4.0. The first reviews from the playtest submission have come back - some really good comments have been generated.
This section of the web site is about writing a managed .net directx game engine.
Why another new engine? Why not start with an existing open source example? Why not use my old commercial code? All good questions.
The benefits of using an older code base include commercial quality testing, complete (i.e. tool suite as well as rendering, AI and networking) and efficient. The downsides include code rot - the engine is full of some assumptions that in the modern era look somewhat flawed (e.g. max texture size limited to 256).
I use C# quite a bit in my commercial work. I suspect I don't fully understand some of the issues to do with garbage collection yet (especially in a high performance environment). This may be a good opportunity.
The development is split into a number of numbered sections.
Charybdis also developed a sequel to the ever popular Magic and Mayhem series. The sequel was somewhat confusingly called "Magic and Mayhem: The Art of Magic".
I was lucky enough to be the project lead on MM2 and had the great fortune of working with many fine developers, artists, musicians, testers and management team.
Unfortunately Charybdis ceased trading just as we were finishing The Art of Magic. Luckily the publisher (Virgin Interactive) paid a small group of the original developers to finish the game off.
Please follow the links to the Art of Magic part of the site.