Wanted: Coder for VVVVVV maintenance

Edit 26th March 2014: I’ve now found somebody for this job. Thank you!

Embedded that video mostly because I just wanted another reason to tell people about that medley. OMG, have you seen it? I know, right?

Heads up, this is a job offer post. If you’re not a coder looking for work, it’s probably going to be very boring oh no

I’m just back from GDC, and made a decision to take some time out of my projects to finish up a couple of small jobs that have been hanging around for way too long. One of those jobs is to finally update VVVVVV, which is currently in need of a patch.

The current steam and humble store version of the game is 2.0, which is the first version of Simon Roth’s C++ port. It’s mostly pretty stable, but it does have some issues – time trial scores aren’t saved, for example, a bunch of other small things like that.

There is a version 2.1, but it’s not live on steam – Simon did some work on the rendering code to make it hardware accelerated, which improves the games performance, but caused it to break for other people. I decided that it wasn’t worth the risk to make that version live and potentially break the game for people who’d not have problems with it before. 2.1 fixes most of the 2.0 bugs, and adds some nice new features (like maps in player levels, coloured text in player levels, and some cool new player levels included by default like Dimension 333333). The 3DS version is essentially 2.1.

There’s also an unreleased version 2.2, which adds joypad support and a few other small things.

I’d like to hire someone for a week or two to finish version 2.2 of the game. If you’re an experienced C++ coder familar with Windows, Mac and Linux, available to start now and interested in working on this, I’d like to hear from you!

A broad overview of what’s involved:
– Get familiar with VVVVVV’s terribly messy code, and clean it up where possible.
– Update the rendering code to make it safe and stable on all platforms.
– Finish implementing the 2.2 patch, which includes a couple of half implemented features and a couple of features still to be implemented that we can talk more about.
– Mac Specific: Ensure that the game works correctly on the latest versions of OSX, and get the game ready to re-submit to the Mac App Store.
– Linux Specific: Ensure that the game runs nicely on the latest multitude of confusing linux systems.
– Steam Specific: Implement steamworks support in the game.
– A few other secret things I don’t want to list here.

An ideal candidate for the job is someone who can be on call from here on out to fix issues that crop up. For example, should a mac update cause the game to suddenly stop working (these things happen, especially on mac), then you should be available to sort it out at your usual hourly rate without too much of a delay.

If this sounds like something you’re interested in, get in touch, and we can discuss rates, deadlines, and more about what’s involved. Thanks!