Automating Asset Generation in Photoshop

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....

April 8, 2011 · Alex

What's This Monkey Business?

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....

March 25, 2011 · Alex

GDC Around the Corner

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....

February 23, 2011 · Alex

Adding an Upgrade Path to In App Purchases

Tilt to Live HD’s Viva la Turret mode is now live and people seem to be enjoying it. One of the bigger hurdles in this prior update was getting in app purchases to work the way we wanted them to without violating the standard user experience of IAP. I figured I’d share how I went about solving this for Tilt to Live HD specifically. We had a few business goals in mind:...

February 14, 2011 · Alex

Running Wild with GameKit

I’m still in the middle of finishing up our Co-op mode for Tilt to Live and coding in the last odds and ends to polish up the UI. The gameplay rules have be finalized and it’s been a hoot to play. Yes, I said hoot. We’ll be playtesting the mode in the coming weeks to do any minor tweaking to the physics and balance. The wireless P2P GameKit API has been pretty cool to work with....

February 3, 2011 · Alex

A Small Update

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 24, 2011 · Alex

So Much To Do…

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....

January 14, 2011 · Alex

2010 in Review and This Year's Goals

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....

January 5, 2011 · Alex

Building with two projects at the same time

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....

December 24, 2010 · Alex

Fixing interference problems with iSimulate (Bluetooth = Bad)

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....

December 16, 2010 · Alex