A friend of mine sent me this list of anti-patterns common in software engineering. Being the lone developer on my team, I don’t get to see anyone else’s code except mine on a project. As a result, it’s hard to critique whether my code is “good” or not. That was one of the benefits of working at a company I suppose. Being surrounded by those with more experience than me, I would learn a lot just from an afternoon of working on a section of code that wasn’t mine....
After reading Noel’s post on prototyping I realized I was drifting away from that mind set and getting into dangerous territory of just “thinking up a game and running with it.” Tilt to Live itself spawned into a full game from being discovered in a rough prototype. Since then we’ve just had rough documents and ideas that we wished to pursue after TTL. The past few weeks we’ve been gearing up more heavily for our next game and I’ve been getting back into the habit of whipping out fast prototypes....
I recently made a post on our official OML blog about what Adam and I are playing. Taking a look at that list you’ll find that the vast majority of games I play are multiplayer oriented. A lot of biases, inspirations, and design decisions that go into my game designs are influenced by multiplayer games. When we set out to start One Man Left, my long term goal for the company (beyond making fun games we like to play) was to be known for making fun multiplayer indie games for whatever platform we develop for....
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....
I had an issue where several international users were reporting that the game was crashing. As it turns out, using an NSNumberFormatter would return a weird character to display as the grouping separator. This would be all good and dandy, but the problem lies in the fact that I’m using bitmap fonts to render, and the look-up failed causing a hard crash. In Tilt to Live’s case, this was in regards to how number grouping symbols are displayed in different locales....
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....
I spent this past weekend getting retina display graphics implemented in Tilt to Live for iPhone 4. The cynic in me hates the marketing term ‘retina graphics’ because on the production side, it’s simply just a bigger image. But I guess you do need a name for it, and since ‘HD’ has already been bastardized on the iPad I guess this will do. I decided to write this post to bring a bit of awareness to some of the process of updating your OpenGL game for the retina displays if you choose to do so....
It’s been hellishly busy as of late, as I’m knee deep in Tilt to Live HD. Now on with my quick blurb: This tip is kind of a “duh” much in the same way version control software is for most developers. The thing is I still meet a lot of developers who don’t use any form of version control. And automated builds simply weren’t even in my own tool set initially....
It’s been busy, busy, busy as of late. We’re in full swing trying to get Tilt to Live HD ready for the iPad. It’s looking amazing thus far and plays a lot better than just the 2x mode for the original Tilt to Live. Frostbite mode just went out the door a few days ago, and the response has been positive so far. We’ve been getting some responses from users saying the game has become too easy in the other modes....
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....