Portfolio on OliverBrown.me.uk

Q War - Shockwave game

Wed, 27 May 2026 15:20:39 +0000

At around the same time that I worked on Supremacy, I worked on another game called “Q War”.

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Both were inspired by the content of Gary Rosenzweig’s Advanced Lingo for Games book. But where Supremacy was a slight refinement and rebranding of a complete game, Q War takes one behaviour (the implementation of the bullet sprites from both the “Space Invaders” and “Space Rocks” games) and builds a different game, complete with “original” graphics.

Supremacy - Shockwave game

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:20:39 +0100

I started programming from a young age. One of the earliest programming projects I worked on that I was pleased with was a version of Risk called “Supremacy”.

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Shockwave was a technology created by Macromedia as a sort of companion/competitor/successor to the then ubiquitous Flash¹.

Importing old posts from my first blog

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 18:25:39 +0100

I have now imported posts from my very first blog, which was in fact the very first content I hosted on OliverBrown.me.uk.

It is almost entirely personal content with evidence of some of my early attempts to make money online.

As with the LiveJournal content, it is available in its own section I decided to call phpdiary. I didn’t really give it a name at the time but it was implemented as a bunch plain text files for each post rendered with a PHP script called diary.php.

Importing old posts from LiveJournal

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 17:25:39 +0100

Before I hosted my own content in various forms, I maintained a LiveJournal which is still available at https://galaxiaguy.livejournal.com (although I warn you, when I looked at it today it was full of Russian Bitcoin related ads).

I have finally imported the missing posts from this.

There weren’t many so I just did it manually. I even went to the effort of updating my theme to include “mood” and “music” in my post front matter and it add it to theme (these were very important to LiveJournal back in the day).

Blog moved to Hugo

Thu, 16 Jul 2020 10:48:28 +0100

After spending most of its time on Wordpress (initially a self-hosted version and then Wordpress.com), the blog is now a static site generated with Hugo and running as an Azure Static Web App.

Ever since I created the Tic-tac-toe Collection site on Hugo I’ve wanted to move the blog, but I never had the time. The recent events related to COVID-19 have, however, given me random bits of free time, so here we are.

Tic-tac-toe Collection open beta

Wed, 24 Jan 2018 10:45:53 +0000

For various reasons I decided to write a Tic Tac Toe game in Xamarin Forms. At the moment it supports variable board sizes, variable win line size (so it implicitly supports Gomoku) and a few custom rules like misère, a pie rule and disallowed overlines.

It currently functions on Android, iOS and Windows, but is only released on Android for now.

Apart from experimenting with various features of Xamarin Forms (as well as managing Nuget packages), my goal is to try and add all the options. Features I’m planning:

Welcome!

Sun, 12 Dec 2004 21:47:00 +0000

I really think I should write something exciting for my inaugural entry. The fact that I did this at all is quite amazing. I’ve thought about it a few times but kept deciding I could write my own that was better; but never got round to it. Well I could always just embed it into a website of my own if I wanted to.

Odd coincidence. I spell checked my entry and it came up with “ve” (from “I’ve”) as an error. “Ve” is a gender-neutral personal pronoun used by Greg Egan; an author whose books I’m reading at the moment. Very good books by the way.