About

I’m a game developer working from the UK. You can contact me at martin@placeholder-software.co.uk.

Bio

Games have been part of my life for as long as I can remember - my Dad was introducing me to playing games loaded from tapes onto our PC before I even went to school! Throughout primary school I abused my position as a “Computer Monitor” to stay indoors and learn programming during lunchtimes and by the time I was in secondary school I’d learnt some of the basics of programming with C++ and Visual Basic 5. Six years later I took my first formal programming classes in college and rediscovered the love for programming I had lost in High school ICT classes. From there onwards I spent every spare second at breaks and lunchtimes programming hundreds of games in Visual Basic, there are even a couple of them still available online (probably requires some voodoo magic to work on a modern computer).

I went on to do a Computer Science degree at the University Of Birmingham and learnt about the abstract mathematical fundamentals of computing theory as well as more practical software engineering principles. In the second year my team for the group programming course built a 2D multiplayer action/platformer (requires Java) called Twilight Nightmare which won the students choice award for best game. I spent my spare time building larger, much more ambitious 3D games using C# and XNA.

After graduating in 2011 I decided to become a full time indie developer. I started working with a team of 3 other people on a action platformer inspired by Twilight Nightmare (but with much more developed mechanics) and professional art. Unfortunately this fell through as other people on the team found full time jobs and couldn’t find enough time to work on the game.

After this I spent 5 years working on a cooperative multiplayer bank heist game (Heist) built in my own scriptable and moddable game engine designed from the ground up for procedurally generated worlds (Epimetheus). Although progress was good it became clear that this was far too much for one person to build in a reasonable amount of time!

In 2016 I co-founded Placeholder Software with my long time friend Tom Gillen. We have developed assets for Unity such as Dissonance Voice Chat and Wet Stuff.

Open Source

I’m a huge believer in Open Source and I try to open source everything I work on that isn’t something I plan to sell. Most of my open source projects are hosted over at Github. Some of the most interesting ones are:

  • martindevans.github.com - This blog!
  • Yolol.IL a compiler for the Yolol language into dotnet bytecode.
  • PicoToast a port of my most famous VB game, Toast, to run on a Raspberry Pi Pico.
  • VBToast the original source code of Toast, written in VB6 many years ago!
  • Myre - an XNA game engine/framework which Epimetheus is built on top of.
  • MumbleSharp - A partial implementation of the Mumble protocol in C# (everything except voice)
  • Supersonic Sound - A C# wrapper around FMOD Studio
  • LLamaSharp - A C# wrapper around llama.cpp, which I am a major contributor to.