In 2015 I managed to land 4 freelance features, writing for some of my favourite websites on both web development topics and video games. I’m very grateful to the editors at Rock Paper Shotgun, Polygon, Smashing Magazine, and SitePoint for commissioning my work.
You can take a look below:
- How GOG.com Save and Restore Classic Games: An exploration of video game preservation, based on interviews with archivists and engineers at GOG.com. This feature uncovers the process of digital archaeology, including license acquisition, emulators & wrappers, code hunting, and digitisation of printed assets, as well as touching on the wider issues surrounding the preservation of classic titles.
- Bridging the generation gap: Porting games to new platforms: This feature explores remastered and ported video games, and is based on my interviews with developers at Naughty Dog, Bluepoint Games, Nixxes Software, Aspyr Media, and Digital Eclipse. Using ‘The Last of Us Remastered’ as a case study, the piece explores the unique challenges inherent to the reproduction of interactive experiences.
- Technical SEO in 2015: Wiring Websites for Organic Search: This comprehensive guide to technical SEO is aimed primarily at web developers, and walks readers through the fundamental principles of organic search optimisation. The article covers crawl accessibility, indexation diagnostics, canonicalisation, multi-regional and multilingual setups, link profile maintenance and more.
- Responsive Sprite Animations with ImageMagick and GreenSock: This tutorial explains how to create the responsive sprite animations seen in my feature on Command & Conquer. The guide includes instructions for creating image sprites using the command line, animating them using the CSS keyframe syntax while maintaining their responsive dimensions, and finally a technique to bind playback to the scrollbar using JavaScript.
Enjoy.