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While I was working at a day job for the past couple of years I was gobbling up any info I could find on going fully independent and the what it takes not only from a business perspective, but what you have to change about your personal life, ideals, and expectations in order to make it sustainable. One of things that stuck out a lot was managing my burn rate. Minimizing the amount of money leaving my account wasn’t just a matter of not buying a Starbucks coffee (I don’t even drink coffee, but you get the idea)....

When your profession empowers you to design literally just about anything, it’s easy to rationalize just about any game design decision. Hell, I somehow managed to rationalize that our new power up for Tilt to Live have a screeching hawk sound effect. Bad idea? You’ll have to wait and see. When Adam and I are working on design details for how a particular system or game mechanic will work, we bring a lot of assumptions to the table of how we think people think....

Ahh, my first idevblogaday post! For those that don’t know, idevblogaday is a group of indie dev bloggers started by Miguel Á. Friginal of @mysterycoconut games to get developers blogging more regularly. So we’ll see how that goes :]. After finishing the initial release of Tilt to Live I had been wanting to gather up my thoughts on what I had learned about making a game that is heavily dependent on accelerometer controls....

Looking back at some of my old blog posts where I contemplate and muse about long term career goals; I would have never guessed 9 months later I would sitting here having accomplished one of my ‘loftier’ ones: Become a full time independent game developer. It’s been 23 days since I cut the chord and went full time indie. And the range of emotions are wild and varied as I flail about trying to get settled into a new and super exciting lifestyle....

…it’s so calming. I remember registering this domain in similar weather conditions, hence the name :). I submitted an update to Tilt to Live earlier this week, after crunching for a few days to get it done. So much to say and so little time :[. Heading up to New York City this weekend with family, which’ll be enjoyable. Went there for the first time a couple weekends ago since middle school, and it was so captivating....

Here I was thinking that once Tilt to Live was out the door, that it’d calm down a bit and I’d get a breather to rest for a few days. Wrong. Running off the early buzz of Tilt to Live we took it as an opportunity to generate some extra excitement for our upcoming updates. It was a very weird shift going from a mostly ‘quiet’ development cycle of just spending days coding away to suddenly spending the majority of the next few weeks doing PR, marketing, chatting with players, etc....

Tilt to Live has been unleashed on the unsuspecting public! So far the general vibe has been extremely positive! Adam and I are both pretty excited about getting our first app store game out the door. What’s interesting is the workload went from “lull” to “overdrive” in a matter of days as we ramped up for release and still are trying to coordinate things for a bigger media push in the coming weeks....

So I’m using OpenAL to do the audio in Tilt to Live. Over the course of development audio became the bottleneck of my game, both in size and in performance. The following could help you if you’re experience audio performance issues and are somewhat new to OpenAL. Let me preface this with: Don’t blindly optimize. Measure, Measure, MEASURE! Know what your bottleneck is before trying to tune code! Don’t make more than 32 sources objects in OpenAL....

We’re extremely close to submitting our first title “Tilt to Live“. We plan on submitting it this upcoming Friday. After a long and grueling (but awesome fun!) development cycle we’ve learned a ton. I figured an interesting way to distill our new found knowledge it would be in very short “dev tips” for developing an iPhone game. Today I start out with audio: Compressing Audio By the end of development our game weighed in at 16 MB....

I’ve received a few e-mails now regarding this tutorial that was hosted on Ziggyware’s site. So here’s a quick post to help others save some time and give an update on it’s status: Ziggyware.com seems to be down indefinitely. As a temporary solution until I get back around to hosting this tutorial myself you can find the Google cached version of it here. If you wish to look at the sample code and illustrations in full you can download the XNA sample from my site here....