The State of Middle Brain Software

Admittedly, it’s been a long time since our last update.  I will try to be brief regarding our status:

The Bad

• As you can tell, our first project, an XNA Game Studio game, made a slight amount of progress and then, like so many others, died.  We have no plans to resurrect it, and even if we did, it would likely be on a different platform.
• Our second project, the iPhone game, also failed to get far off the ground.  I blame myself for taking on a project that was too challenging for someone just beginning with iPhone development.

The Good

• I continued to train myself in iPhone development over the past year, and Dave and I actually released a cartoon-photo-editing app called PhotoToons. 

It’s a fun app that I’m excited to continue updating with new stamps and features.  Most of the stamps were created by your favorite artist and mine, Dave Johnson.  You can look forward to continued releases in the coming months.

• We also released an iPhone app for Dave’s podcast (The Dave and Steve Show), called Dave and Steve’s Droppings.  It was remarkable how much faster the development process went compared to PhotoToons thanks to the learning hurdles I had since overcome.

The Present and Future

Oddly enough, my previous post discussed the necessity of me learning OpenGL ES in order to create a game with reasonable performance.  Well, over a year later, I’ve become far more competent with the technology, and have surrounded myself with resources (both text-based and meat-based) that have become invaluable in the past couple months.  More importantly, I’m making a conscious effort to ween myself of the “it’s too difficult, don’t bother” mindset. 

Given this, I’ve been hard at work on a 2D game and engine.  I want to start with something feasible and simple as a learning project.  One potential application Dave and I have discussed is a mini-game incorporated into the Dave and Steve’s Droppings app.

Stay tuned to see what becomes of our efforts!  If nothing else, you can laugh if the next post arrives a year from now.