Tanglewood Update - Computerphile

Key Takeaways

here we go what have we got so this is an almost final draft of the cover we've got our own boxes produced we've got our own cartridge mold produced those not to upset Sega we've got our own logos on them big evil Corporation cartridges there so the physical side of it is nearly ready to go all I need to do now is finish the game we caught up with you oh how long ago is it I finished the first level which is split into three acts and it's got most of the main mechanics running I think you're about to run the kickstarter right it was mid Kickstarter yeah mid Kickstarter yeah yeah yeah and obviously for those who haven't seen that video your Kickstarter was successful which congratulations thank you very much where you at with it then what's what's happening with the game um yeah it's taken just over a year so far to get to this this point from the kickstarter uh we're about 90% finished there's a few audio things to fix up um some bugs and it's going to head for close beta testing so I expect in the next couple of months we should have our gold build I understand things took off quite recently with uh yeah you got a bit of exposure you weren't perhaps expecting yeah I did an interview for the BBC I had a PR campaign planned to drop at the same time as the video uh it went a bit earlier than I expected I was on my way to an event called play Expo in Blackpool and I got a phone call saying that was on the TV so I had to quickly pull over on the motorway at a Starbucks and quickly launch our website it was a bit of a hairy moment fantastic have you had a lot more interest since that then yeah it's been quite Manic the past couple of weeks since that interview went live uh I've had other people contact me for magazine interviews and videos and uh podcasts and things like that it's been non-stop for the past couple of weeks let's be frank now did you quit your job for this yes I did quit my job for this uh for better or worse so what's what's going on long term then uh long term uh once we finished up releasing the Mega Drive version we're going to Port it to the Dreamcast um and then it's coming two modern consoles hopefully if the Publishers are on board with it um after that we've got another two games up Our Sleeve so we're going to do this all over again you're saying we and us um you work with people on this are they sort of like characters you work with all the time or yeah uh for the first game I worked with some contractors um it was mostly myself making the game though um for the next one I'm not sure I could stomach it again so I think I'm going to hire some stuff we see quite often people Indie Games producers getting stuck in a rabbit hole of working on their own game for years and years and years how do you avoid that do you know you don't but you you no I suppose the question is it looks like you're getting near to completion so it feels like there is light at the end of the tunnel whereas we hear of games getting stuck in development health or want of a better word um is do you think this is something to do with the limitations of the devices is you're working on rather than yeah I think that plays some part and there's only so much we can do on the Mega Drive um we can't upgrade the graphics engine we can't add much more to it we're out of ROM space using all four megabyte of the cartridge so there's nothing more we can do to the game we've got no space in Ram ROM we've got no CPU Cycles left we've maxed the whole thing out um which uh it's a both a curse and a blessing because we have to say this is it now we've got to polish this up and release it and feature creepers is not an issue here when's the uh when are you slated release what's the latest kind of ETA the plan is mid 2018 uh we're we're penciling in late May early June at the moment and it has its own set of registers these aren't general purpose registers for adding numbers and stuff each one has a specific purpose uh so one will be in control of the background color um 16 to D1 so we can see that D1 changes to 16 in HEX and then at the two together