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....

I’ve started holding a particular mindset in regards to game design a little while after I started working on iPhone games, but I could never really articulate what I was feeling without sounding like a lazy game developer or religious nut. Danc’s article over at lostgarden reflects a lot of what I think about games as a medium, and what they can do, and where they are heading (good or bad)....

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....

With December quickly approaching we’re finishing up our next major update to Tilt to Live. We just finished putting in the new achievements and I figured I’d share with you some of the guidelines I try to follow more or less. Maybe you’ll find some good ideas for achievements for your own game if you happen to be working on one, or maybe re-think some of them. Bad Idea Don’t make the player grind (actively) This might be fine in a hardcore RPG (I don’t think it is personally, and just a sign of an outdated design philosophy), but in the mobile games arena time is of the essence....

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....

Gamezebo was kind enough to host the post mortem I wrote up for Tilt to Live. You can find it here.

Sometimes being able to ‘unplug’ is exactly what I need to recharge my motivation. This past weekend I did just that. Adam and I headed up to DC to attend the “Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear”. I use to live in DC so ti was great visiting and meeting up with old friends and just exploring the city. I tweeted maybe 1 or 2 times the entire weekend. My laptop never came on, and I actually didn’t randomly browse my RSS feed or facebook until I got back home in Montgomery....