Welcome

Welcome to The Cloister Room, the website of Andrew Sage.

This website contains a wide range of items lovingly crafted by myself both in the digital and real world.

You can find a selection of computer games (both free and the kind that cost you money) for Mac OS X, Windows, Pocket PC and Palm PDA's.

You can also find a selection of articles related to computer game development. Some of these are theory based on experience, others are actual tutorials - such as the FlipSquare series for writing a desktop Mac game using Cocoa.

The website also contains some examples of my artistic work ranging from oil paintings to photography to computer animation.

Registering Software

If you are looking to register the Palm or Pocket PC games Chromacell,Card Games or Card Games: Variations on a Theme then please visit the Software section of my site. Once you have registered the software feel free to look around at what else I get up to.

Answers to a Couple of Questions You May Ask

What's the story behind the site's name?

cloister - a covered walk in a convent, monastery, college, or cathedral, typically with a wall on one side and a colonnade open to a quadrangle on the other. Any place or position of seclusion.

The name took its inspiration from the 3D animation of a walk through a cloister. In the word's seclusion sense this site is a nice quiet escape from the rat race of the internet and the world at large.

When is the Cocoa Game development book you were working on coming out?

The simple answer - sorry, never.

The long answer - the old motivation demon ambushed me a while back while I was recovering from going round in circles having no luck finding a publisher (Of course Mac book sales are down when the only books are for a discontinued OS!).

When I attempted to get going with the project again I came to the conclusion that it was just not worth my effort. Even if I went down the self publishing book the return on my investment of time would fail to clear minimum wage. Some may say that is a selfish view to take, but it is not as if I've not given my experience and knowledge away for free already.

Why does the site look so bare?

With this new version of my website I have decided to try and keep things as clean and simple as possible. I've got enough clutter in the real world so no point in adding more here.

Why are you writing this at 4am in the morning when you should be asleep?

Good question! You know how it is though, you start something as an experiment at a reasonable time of day and then before you know where you are 5 hours have passed. At least this time round I have a new website design to show for it!

What did you use to create the site?

No fancy web editors were used in the creation of this website. It was all developed by hand using TextEdit on my G5 iMac.

I first started writing web pages right back at the beginning of the World Wide Web. Back then there were no fancy editors. Over the years I have tried various editors but I still find it most productive writing them by hand.

Why are you still up writing this?

Once again a good question! Right I'm now off to get some sleep (once I've posted this online of course!).