…looks like I’ll be hitting a bit of crunch time in the coming weeks. Blog entries will probably be dwindling over the next month or so as I try to put the finishing touches on Tilt To Live. On that note: No matter how much energy you feel like you have and no matter how motivated you are at seeing a project to the end, you still need to take breaks from it....
As I’m zeroing in on finishing Tilt To Live some of the bigger assets are coming through from Adam and the game size has grown a lot faster than it has in past few months. One of the unstated goals of mine was to keep the game under 10 MB. Why? You are not allowed to download apps, podcasts, or videos that are larger than 10 MB over 3G. You are required to connect to wi-fi in order to do it on your iPhone....
I’ve made some serious progress as of late with Tilt To Live. The age old saying “I’m 90% done…” is rearing its head and yet it feels like there’s 90% more to go! This is a bit regurgitated, but saw an interesting bit in a post on burnout and motivation at Zen Habits: 1. Achieve in increments. When you only focus on a big goal someday, it’s easy to get burned out by the daily grind....
I finally got rid of the stupid… “ld: warning in .so, file is not of required architecture.” …warning when using iSimulate. If you’re not using iSimulate or a similar technology you’re losing valuable time even if you don’t use the accelerometer or GPS functions. Then again, I might not be the best spokesperson on time since I spent the weekend re-inventing the wheel. I have this need to make sure my projects compile w/o warnings....
It’s getting around that time when I’m spending more time working on the game as I realize how many little things need to be fixed, added, tweaked. I’ve recently given up most of my weekends now in an effort to get more hours in. I’m currently working 6 out of the 7 days a week on the game in some way. It’s mostly game programming, sometimes graphics, web development, emailing, phone calls, or getting business forms and other legal stuff squared away....
Every now and then I come across a game that is rather inspiring. Strangely, a lot of them come from the flash community. I really like it when someone can take a game mechanic that is so utterly constrained and create something so enjoyable out of it. The epitome of these design challenges might be the ‘One-Button’ games. I just recently came across Canabalt, and it had me playing for a while despite the need for sleep....
I’ve had a rather productive weekend! Implemented a handful of new art assets from Adam, finished some more gameplay code, optimized a bit, and even released a new build to testers tonight. It wasn’t a smooth process, but when is it ever? I was having an issue with loading the assets of the game at app launch and it caused the game to crash if it ever took more than 20 seconds to load the assets....
Last week was a busy week as I spent most of it implementing and tweaking the really basic tutorial system I had in mind for Tilt To Live. From my gameplay experiences I feel tutorials have gotten pretty good at being integrated into the game themselves and not being ridiculously wordy/boring. I’m not sure if it’s that I tend to grok how most genre game mechanics work from many years of playing, or understand the basic ‘standards’ across games in the same genre, or that the tutorials are really getting better....
Tangible goals are key to any project. Without them I feel like I’m peddling up a steep hill just so I can peddle up some more. Scheduling and time logs showing time spent are great for statistical and historical purposes, but in the scheme of things can do little to save a project if you and your team lack that motivation needed to push the last mile. Countless indie games die from loss of interest....
When it comes to gui coding I don’t typically find it the most glamorous things to do. Particularly when dealing with games. You are left with writing a lot of boiler plate GUI code that is tightly integrated with your rendering pipeline. And even when I do find gui libraries for games they tend to try to emulate the OS in look and feel. When you want something lightweight and very interactive/animated you typically have to write it and integrate it yourself....