Plans

Hi all,

It’s been great hearing from folks since the recent update to Bullet Candy went live. I’d updated Son of Scoregasm earlier in the year but only to get it running properly again. Bullet Candy has been a complete re-write from the ground up, porting it’s ancient code to C and SDL3, re-creating the originals as best possible and adding a load of new stuff. Do check it out!

I’ve received load of lovely emails from people saying how good it is to hear the game is still alive or expressing surprise that I’d come out of the woodwork to update a 20 year old game nobody plays any more but i have reasons for doing it…

First is that i have a strong dislike for digital obsolescence and the current trend in games of buying a license to play a game while big-tech/greedy publisher X says you can. I want you to be able to play what you paid for. I’m aware that by selling my stuff on Steam I’m falling into this trap to some extent, but I’m not really sure how viable trying to sell games on PC is without it at this point. itch.io have always (unless i missed something) been good guys here, and were incredibly helpful for indies when the EU brought in the VATMOSS thing years back. The thing is it’s incredibly difficult to sell digital products online without going through an intermediary to do the tax/vat stuff and order fulfillment, it’s not like when i started doing this and you could just plop a Paypal button on your webpage. </grumble mode>

With this in mind, I’m intending to get the rest my old stuff back up and running on modern hardware in the near future. It won’t be overnight (Scoregasm has a lot of code and a lot of content, I’m scared!), but i am working on it.

Secondly, and more technically, the various versions of Bullet Candy cover most of the tech I’ll need to implement in order to get the rest of my games running. For example, the 2D rendering code used in Bullet Candy is the same as i used in Irukandji, Space Phallus and the 2D bits of Scoregasm, and the 3D stuff used in Bullet Candy Perfect is the same that does the rest of Scoregasm, so it makes sense to start with Bullet Candy. The recent 20th anniversary update has launched with few bug reports, so that’s reassuring. Once I’ve gotten the last few bits into Bullet Candy I’ll have everything in place to get the others moving along quickly, plus start on some new stuff too! More on this soon…

I’m not using AI for any of this. The whole ethos behind the former charliesgames and now charliemakesthings is that i make the things. Well, aside from the music (I tried, it was bad, Johns tunes are great!). Using the plagiarism machine would defeat the point before i even started.

Anyway, thanks for all the lovely feedback so far! I’m aiming to get the next level pack for Bullet Candy 2026 up next week sometime, along with an update to Son of Scoregasm for non-steam users so that their names appear in the scores correctly again. Huzzah for unannounced API changes!

Support your independents!

Cheers Charlie

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