My first week off the iDevBlogADay rotation and I miss my usual Friday post. Go me. We’ve kind of hit a period where a lot of work is getting done, but an ever growing mountain of work is coming up on the horizon. Polishing a game is hard. Polishing an online turn-based strategy game is really hard. The simplest things take 3-4 more extra steps to do whenever you incorporate a server into your game’s architecture....
So what’s new in the world of OML and Outwitters? Not much really. Just keeping our heads down and working through some of the boilerplate stuff. We iterated a bit on the prototype over the week for visual elements to help make the game more approachable. I got my feet wet in Google App Engine and threw together really basic asynchronous functionality into the prototype in about a day just so I have a clearer understanding of how those things are going to work....
As we’ve announced on the OML site, our new game has a name: Outwitters. It’s been quite busy for the last couple of weeks, but I’m loving it. Being able to tackle new problems and going outside my comfort zone in terms of game development has been pretty fun so far. I’ve never coded a turn-based strategy game from start to finish, so I’m having to learn a slew of new concepts and design patterns to help mitigate the complexity of the game’s rules....
Tilt to Live HD’s Viva la Turret mode is now live and people seem to be enjoying it. One of the bigger hurdles in this prior update was getting in app purchases to work the way we wanted them to without violating the standard user experience of IAP. I figured I’d share how I went about solving this for Tilt to Live HD specifically. We had a few business goals in mind:...
I’m still in the middle of finishing up our Co-op mode for Tilt to Live and coding in the last odds and ends to polish up the UI. The gameplay rules have be finalized and it’s been a hoot to play. Yes, I said hoot. We’ll be playtesting the mode in the coming weeks to do any minor tweaking to the physics and balance. The wireless P2P GameKit API has been pretty cool to work with....
January started off with quite the busy schedule and it hasn’t let up yet. So much to do so little time! Viva la Turret has turned out to be a critical success and people are enjoying it so that’s great. Coming right off the heels of that I wanted to update Tilt to Live HD with Game Center support. It came, and we screwed up (again) :[. There’s a bug with the scoring that cropped up after I added a last minute fix to a less serious bug involving double vortexes....
Ok, that title is kind of misleading. But for those who caught the reference, *high five*. I actually pulled gyroscope support from our latest Tilt to Live update. I had it implemented into the game at one point but through beta testing eventually killed the feature. I just wanted to go over the details as to why it went the way of the dodo bird. Gyroscope != Accelerometer Alright this a biggie....
Let me first start off by saying how great it feels to be genuinely “busy”. I’m talking about the “excited-and-can’t-wait-to-get-started-or-get-finished” type of busy. I’m slowly finding out that the days are flying by with me barely noticing. Each morning, I’m looking forward to getting to work (yes, even Mondays). So either I’m strange or have found something I truly love doing :). Anyway, I don’t have any technical insights for this week’s post, just more of a status update on something I’ve been tinkering with....
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....