Seems this past week I’ve been slammed with a ton of stuff. Had to take a breather, step back and get a bit more organized to gain some perspective. Tax season is in full swing, so that’s always biting at my ankles as this is my first year filing as a self-employed tax payer. Tilt to Live Viva la Coop is close to being live on the app store (hopefully), and HD will be followed up shortly after....
Wow, last week was an intense week, focusing on pretty much Tilt to Live exclusively. Took a nice break/road trip up to North Carolina to do a bit of snowboarding to cap off the week. Conditions weren’t that great, but it was close, cheap, and still fun versus going back out to Colorado. Back today somewhat recharged and ready to go. Haven’t had time to work in Blitzmax at all last week, I hope that’ll change after this week as well....
January started off with quite the busy schedule and it hasn’t let up yet. So much to do so little time! Viva la Turret has turned out to be a critical success and people are enjoying it so that’s great. Coming right off the heels of that I wanted to update Tilt to Live HD with Game Center support. It came, and we screwed up (again) :[. There’s a bug with the scoring that cropped up after I added a last minute fix to a less serious bug involving double vortexes....
2010 was an amazing year for me. While a lot was accomplished, there was a lot left to be accomplished. June 18th, 2010 was the day I fulfilled my dream of becoming a full time indie game developer. Moved back down south from DC to cut living expenses to help my chances at keeping this up as well as be within shouting distance of Adam, my partner in crime. Tilt to Live became a crazy and unexpected success....
I’m currently messing around with bluetooth multiplayer and it’s been a blast so far. The only downside is the much longer turn-around cycles for developing the network code to test on two devices. On the PC it was a bit cumbersome as well, but I could always just run 2 instances side by side locally. I guess if I had spent a little extra time to allow for Wi-fi AND bluetooth I could test with one device and 1 simulator, but it’s still always going to be slower than single device testing....
About to head out for a week into the rockies for some fun snowboarding :D. So I won’t be able to keep up with e-mail, twitter, or the blog for the next week and I’m currently in a rush to pack. I didn’t want to just leave for a week without explanation though. In any case, I still use iSimulate for testing Tilt to Live on the simulator. Having already written about the great benefits of using something like iSimulate I won’t go into the details again....
Wow. I think I’m still digesting thanksgiving dinner. Anyway, we just recently announced our newest game mode for Tilt to Live and it’s a doozy. In the midst of getting it all tested and ready to submit to Apple I had a bug lurking about the loading screen code. At seemingly random times the game would crash with an EXEC_BAD_ACCESS error somewhere in my loading assets functions usually stopping at CGContextDrawImage....
So I’m currently playing around with some multiplayer prototypes on the iphone, and when it came down to testing stuff I ran into a problem: You can’t deploy to multiple devices at the same time. Yea it’s not exactly a ‘problem’ per say, but it’s certainly tedious doing a ‘build and run’ on the devices you want to test. So much so that I dropped 3 player support in a prototype just to save time....
After responding to Noel’s post on the size of games I soon learned it was a wide effort by developers to post their thoughts on this topic so I figured I’d throw my hat into the ring. I’ve had this topic in my head for a very long time and it’s been frustrating hearing friends’ and reviewers’ opinions on games. Other developers have covered this pretty well already so not sure what else I can contribute beyond just a rant :P....
Markus Nigrin wrote a great follow-up to my previous post on managing one’s burn rate when going independent. His post touches on some really important information that I completely left out of mine, namely, being educated about investing and not ignoring it. I’m guilty of this as well, but only since “cutting the chord” have I become much more concerned about my lack of education about investing, and it’s something I’m currently working to improve....