Last night, I had another game approved for the App Store… iTunes: click here to open iTunes download page I started writing this as a real-life demo on how to use the tech for my new company (if any of our early access licensees are reading this, a project ZIP […]
dev-process
45 posts
(c.f. my original post here: http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/06/28/want-to-help-write-a-simple-rpg-for-iphone/) I’ve been playing around with GUI setups for DM / EOTB / Wizardry clones on iPhone, and thought I’d post some of the more interesting results here – I’m interested to see what other people think of each of them. The first three are […]
The furore[link] over the IGDA’s failure[link] to live up to it’s own precepts continues to snowball[link] [link] (as I suggested it would, if the IGDA Board didn’t ‘fess up and take a stand[link] against the unethical practices they were being implicated in). (I’ll do a summary later this week; personally […]
I had to do some iPhone prototyping recently, and we had a trial copy of Unity to hand. I thought this was a great excuse to try using it. First impressions of the editor/IDE/environment – at least on OS X – are not good. NB: In general, in terms of […]
PHP is weak, crappy, and encourages people to write terrible code. But … if you know what you’re doing, all of those might actually be really really good things. (by the way, if you haven’t already, you should read Eric Ries thoughts on PHP…) “Best Practices” are one of the […]
In the online games industry, if we keep quiet about the causes, the hopes, the fears, the successes, and the failures of the best part of $100million burnt on a single project, then what hope is there for us to avoid making the same mistakes again?
Thomas and Diane have posted a short guide to Pitching to Game Publishers over at the blog for their game consultancy. Apart from giving them some link love (they’re not even on Technorati yet), it’s an excuse for me to tack-on some quick thoughts of my own. (NB: my experience […]
In my joyous travels developing a fun little iPhone game recently, I kept track of all the many tips and tricks and gotchas I came across. There are a fair few bugs in Apple’s IDE (including at least one critical one that bit me), some stunningly bad flaws in the […]
Oh, wait, actually they’re not. But people love to misinterpret statements with the word Google and the number 20 in them. As I put in the comments: Frankly, I’ve generally not bothered to correct anyone who didn’t bother to research it themselves – except in the cases where they were […]
Your possible answers include: 1. Because … Apple engineers have never heard of the concept of a “patch”, and require you to re-download the *entire IDE*, with all libraries, all documentation, all binary code – everything – when they release an update? So the current “SDK” for iPhone (hint for […]
Lots of ideas and detailed explanation from games industry Producers and production staff on the IGDA Production mailing list here. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that the people who run the Production SIG don’t believe in allowing you – the public – to read their conversations. So all I can do is […]
1. Ask people to join the closed beta 6 months before the open beta happens http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1/topics/8117 Dinowaurs Beta Testers Wanted We’re now inviting Kongregate members to sign up to test the Dinowaurs Beta. If you don’t know what Dinowaurs is, go here for more info: http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1/topics/3350. Simply pop in to […]
On this site I have a rather subtly-hidden Blog Roll. When I started blogging, the site had less on it, and the roll was easy to find – and short. Now it’s not. And it’s long. And each link on there has been carefully considered. There’s some gems in there […]
I’m there now, drop me a line (see About page for email) if you’re around. I’ve just given a quick presentation introducing the ENISA’s (European Network and Information Security Agency) whitepaper on “Security and Privacy in MMO’s and VW’s”. It’s free, and it’s fairly simple (aimed at everyone from consumers […]
Andrew Chen has just written a post comparing the cultural differences between Web industry people and Games industry people. They’re all very interesting, and on the whole I’d say they’re on the money – definitely worth reading (and see if you can spot yourself in some of the either/or’s ;)). […]
Thord Hedengren (TDH) posted for GigaOM a list of things you should and shouldn’t do immediately after launching an MMO. They are mostly specious – I’m afraid I have no idea who Thord is or what he’s done, but from reading the article I get the impression he doesn’t know […]
This is a quick review of free tools for web analytics / stats-analysis / weblog analysis. I’ll follow up with some more detailed posts about non-web tracking. Follow-up posts will extend this into game development, but this post is purely about web stuff.
(this is part 2 of Publishers are from Mars, Developers are from Venus) Last time I said that “good Developers are very similar to Valley Technology Startups”, which suggests one obvious way things could develop: Publishers to become Venture Capitalists; Developers to become commodities In this model, the Publishers spend […]
Over the last few years, there has been a big shift in power and success away from independent studios, and towards in-house, publisher-owned studios. This has been driven by several things, sound economic reasons, competitive reasons, and because the strong independent studios had done a good job at creating a […]
(I’m quoting a very handy short extract from Clinton Keith’s December 2007 Gamasutra article, so that I can find it again easily later. Clinton is/was the CTO of High Moon Studios, and is probably the most well-known proponent of Scrum in the games industry. Rather than wade through the whole […]