Keep in mind, a lot of the rambling below is in the context of me being neck-deep in working on Outwitters, which is a strategy board game. I’m constantly thinking of ways to present games, their systems, and their objectives to people. Notice I said people, not gamers, or casual gamers. Sometimes I even look around my own environment and question “why the designer wrote that message the way they did”....
Tomorrow (June 18th) marks the first year anniversary of me becoming a full-time independent game developer. Wow did the time fly by fast! Over the course of the past year I helped launch Tilt to Live HD, Lite, a couple of major gametype updates to Tilt to Live for free, a paid Viva la Turret update, and finally released a multiplayer co-op mode for both our games. When I think about it that way, it’s definitely been a busy year....
It’s been a rather busy last couple of weeks. I’ve actually had a few coding sessions at night, and that hasn’t happened in months. Been having a blast working on Outwitters and we’ve been play testing maps on a weekly basis. In other news, Craig and Gavin, of Retro Dreamer fame, recently released their Velocispider iphone/ipad game. If you haven’t checked it out by now, then you’re missing out on some good old-school arcade fun....
About two weeks ago I mentioned I was looking into using the open source library, gameswf to integrate into our little 2D engine for iOS. I was at the point where I needed a UI solution for Outwitters, and I had a few options: Keep doing what I was doing with Tilt to Live and create the UI by handing coding everything and procedurally animating it Create a UI editor to help automate some of the UI features I had created in Tilt to Live Look into gameswf and see if I could go for the whole she-bang and just use Flash for the UI....
So what’s new in the world of OML and Outwitters? Not much really. Just keeping our heads down and working through some of the boilerplate stuff. We iterated a bit on the prototype over the week for visual elements to help make the game more approachable. I got my feet wet in Google App Engine and threw together really basic asynchronous functionality into the prototype in about a day just so I have a clearer understanding of how those things are going to work....
As we’ve announced on the OML site, our new game has a name: Outwitters. It’s been quite busy for the last couple of weeks, but I’m loving it. Being able to tackle new problems and going outside my comfort zone in terms of game development has been pretty fun so far. I’ve never coded a turn-based strategy game from start to finish, so I’m having to learn a slew of new concepts and design patterns to help mitigate the complexity of the game’s rules....
Wow, time flies when you’re busy. As seen on the OML site, we’ve announced we’re working on our next game. With that out of the bag, I’ll probably be blogging about the progress of it, obstacles I run into, and things that are helping us along with the development that might prove useful to other iOS devs. With that, the first major issue we’ve come across is trying to develop 2D assets for a game that is planned to run in 3 different resolutions....
My first GDC conference was an awesome experience! I’m sure my head exploded multiple times throughout the week attending talks, meeting awesome people, eating great food, and a bit of sight seeing around San Francisco. Unfortunately, I came down with a double whammy of the flu/cold and bronchitis. Being ill the last couple of days of GDC were pretty miserable, but I was able to keep my head up for the rest of the week and try to enjoy what little I could....
Before I start, I just want to mention that after 18 straight weeks of making iDevBlogADay posts, that this will be my last one. I’m following Noel Llopis’s lead and making room for that LARGE waiting list of developers waiting their turn. The point of iDevBlogADay was to encourage developers to blog regularly and help them get in the habit of blogging. I’ll still be making regular posts, so be sure to check back each week!...
This post is more of a public service announcement. Prior to Tilt to Live’s Game Center/Retina update we wanted to extensively test the game with a wider tester base. So we ran a small ‘open beta’ (as open as Apple’s ad-hoc program would allow us). Prior to iOS 4.0 users had to do a cumbersome dance to get an ad-hoc game on their devices. And by cumbersome, I mean anything dealing with the desktop iTunes client....