So much to do with such constrained resources

Well, first things first, Crab Crawl 1.0 is now available in the iTunes app store!

 

So what next?  That brings me to my point.  I am just one person, with a full-time job which takes the bulk of my day.  But I have tons of ideas / desires, and not enough time to see them all through.

Aside from any ideas I have, I’ve got to make sure that I’m keeping my existing apps up-to-date.  That’s an issue I didn’t properly anticipate.  The more apps I create, the more maintenance I have to do.  From a business perspective, it doesn’t make sense to spend much effort updating apps unless they generate a significant amount of revenue, but I still feel compelled to continue to add cool stuff for the customers who support me.  (I had to try really hard to avoid sounding markety-businessy there.)

Beyond that, what should I do next?  Another iPhone game?  That’s my current plan.  But what about the iPad?  It’s had some impressive preorders already and it has a lot of potential.  I could create a game on it, sure, but there are other interesting applications I can envision.

And then, of course, there’s this little thing called the Windows Phone 7 Series.  My knee-jerk reaction is to stay far, far away from any Microsoft phone.  I bought one before, after all – a fancy HTC smartphone with features that put the iPhone to shame.  But Windows Mobile killed my soul.  It was every negative stereotype about Microsoft rolled into a single device.  Slow, cumbersome, annoying, with an OS that felt like it was ported from a desktop version. 

So now, finally, Windows Mobile 7 – er, wait, Windows Phone 7 Series – is on the horizon.  The developer tools are available.  It looks slick and streamlined; more like the Zune (which is good) than a desktop OS (which shouldn’t be on a phone).  But it’s Microsoft, and they know how to take a good thing and screw it up.  I don’t believe I have any unwarranted bias against Microsoft, though.  I want them to succeed, desperately, because I want to use their far superior development tools, and their less-closed platform.  I’ve even gotten over my troubles with the long, Microsoft-esque name: “Windows Phone 7 Series”.  I can write it off as foresight on MS’s part.  (Assuming all goes as planned, we’ll just be calling these things “Windows Phones” and we’ll just tack on a number / designation for whatever the latest version is.)

But it’s so risky to leap to the Windows Phone, and admittedly it’d be a bit soul crushing to come crawling back to Windows after I invested almost 2 years in the iPhone platform.  But if I had a magical guarantee that the Windows Phone was going to have identical marketshare as the iPhone, you better believe I’d jump on it.

GDC Notes Day 1 Part 2

SCRAP METAL: Pushing the Envelope With a Team of Two

Scrap Metal (top down 3D racing game with nice visuals / lighting / etc.) developer talked about his experiences working on scrap metal.  They attempted to write the game using C# / XNA but the performance was “terrible”, they claimed.  It’s a shame that they didn’t dive deeper into the causes of these perf issues.  I’d be really curious to know if managed code optimizations would have fixed this.  Anyway, they switched to C++.

They made a physics engine specific to the game and their general sentiment was that using a one-size-fits-all physics engine “took away the personality” of the game. 

They focused a lot on tools which verified game assets (and even behaviors) in real-time.  Changing AI behaviors, shaders, and even car physics and testing in real time.

They really stressed iteration, focusing on a basic mechanic and creating “vertical slices” and iterating on them.  They said that 80% of the art in the game was created in the last 3 months; it took a long time to get the game to “feel” right.

From Big Studio to Small Indie: Guerilla Tactics from Hello Games (Sean Murray):

(Sadly, my notes became exceptionally crappy as the day went on, so here’s my summary)

- They used an application called Procrastitracker which runs on your PC and tells you how much time you spend doing each activity on your computer, so you get a good idea about how much time is wasted.

- They were very data-driven… I have no idea what this means exactly but I just wrote “very data-driven”, so apparently their game was written in a data-driven way, following the theme of cutting the time needed to test changes.  I am personally horribly lazy, and will all-too-often gladly wait the long time necessary to test changes.

Ugh, worst blog entry ever.  I think I’ll just post highlights from talks I liked rather than pretending to offer full coverage of all the talks I attended.

GDC Day 1 (part 1)

Today was spent divided between the Independent Games Summit and the new iPhone Games Summit.  I’m going to summarize my short notes from the talks today, though I’m pretty tired.  It’s rare for me to be tired at this hour, but it always happens when I’m on vacation and have to walk any significant amount.  I think this is what’s called “normal”.

Indies and Publishers: Fixing a System That Never Worked

Traditionally, when indies get money from publishers, publishers give much more than they need, and as a result expect more of the reward.  Back then, publishers controlled distribution as well, so there was an expectation that they were owed more.  But realistically, indies need less and can handle distribution on their own through various services like Steam, XBLA, Direct2Drive, etc.  As a result, something called The Indie Fund has been created to fund promising indie projects.  contact@indie-fund.com

Abusing Your Players Just For Fun

I thought this would be a tongue-in-cheek title, and assumed the talk would be about ways to present interesting challenges to the player.  But no, this talk was pretty much exactly as the title implied; no deeper meaning whatsoever.  The presenter just presented various Hollywood directors and game makers who make wacky, nonsensical movies, plus some he just thought were cool.  His slides were gratuitously seizure-inducing, with flashy backgrounds just for the heck of it, following his overall theme. 

He showed an example of a mercilessly punishing modded Super Mario Brothers level which essentially breaks all the game design lessons we learned over the past 20 years.  He unapologetically talked about the fun of punishing players and not caring about them, but rather just enjoying watching them suffer.

 

I’ll continue this later.  I need to sleep.

GDC 2010 so far

Well, I was a tiny bit sad to be arriving at GDC on the first day, after all the keynotes had finished, but my pass doesn’t include keynotes so it wouldn’t really matter anyway.

Then, come to find out, despite swearing I had seen GDC listed repeatedly on its website as spanning March 8-13, I suddenly saw listings of March 9-13 everywhere.  Apparently the conference does not in fact start on Monday, but Tuesday.  So I didn’t miss anything.  Though one annoyance was that registration, which I assumed would be open all day, didn’t start until 5pm, so I had to wait for that for an hour and a half.

Also, though I was certain that there were several keynotes, the “Keynotes” link at the GDC 2010 home page only leads to a single keynote, by Sid Meier, on Friday (the day I leave).  So… somehow, despite my intense diligence, I was completely wrong about everything.  It’s like elementary school all over again.

So now I’m in my hotel room, unsure if there’s any sort of party or anything going on that I should attend.  I certainly didn’t hear or read about any.

GDC 2010, here I come

I’m at the airport, waiting for my flight to San Francisco and GDC 2010.  I always plan on blogging / photographing everything and it never works out, so I won’t make any promises this time, but I’d at least like to highlight the stuff I care about.

I’ve only been to GDC once before, in ‘07, and my company footed the bill then.  This time I’m paying for it all myself, which is quite a commitment but it’s sort of my way of telling myself that I’m committed.

I don’t like to admit that I like to say “I told you so”, but…

http://www.creature24.com/2010/03/well-that-was-a-trip/

There’s no easy way to say this but we’ve come to the realization as a team that we need more time to implement all the content that we have for this title, as you can see from the screenshots down below we did set ourselves a quite a tough challenge on this project, however we do want to stress the game will be finished and finished soon.

24 hours from iPhone game idea to submission to the app store?

Creature24
An iPhone/iPod touch game made by 3 guys in just 24 hours!

Yes, you read that right! 3 guys… 24 hours.

Starting with just a skeleton idea; the three of us will implement a complete game from nothing, to full submission to the AppStore within 24 hours.

The fun begins on Saturday, March 6th at 9:00am EST.

Okay, I’m all for game jams, and I like to be encouraging of people’s creative ideas, but this is stretching it.  It takes an hour at least to just prepare your app for submission.  I’d hate to see the type of game that can realistically be completed in 24 hours.  And somehow they’re going to make time to blog their experiences?

We’ll see.