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About two weeks ago I mentioned I was looking into using the open source library, gameswf to integrate into our little 2D engine for iOS. I was at the point where I needed a UI solution for Outwitters, and I had a few options: Keep doing what I was doing with Tilt to Live and create the UI by handing coding everything and procedurally animating it Create a UI editor to help automate some of the UI features I had created in Tilt to Live Look into gameswf and see if I could go for the whole she-bang and just use Flash for the UI....

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....

Wow, time flies when you’re busy. As seen on the OML site, we’ve announced we’re working on our next game. With that out of the bag, I’ll probably be blogging about the progress of it, obstacles I run into, and things that are helping us along with the development that might prove useful to other iOS devs. With that, the first major issue we’ve come across is trying to develop 2D assets for a game that is planned to run in 3 different resolutions....

My first GDC conference was an awesome experience! I’m sure my head exploded multiple times throughout the week attending talks, meeting awesome people, eating great food, and a bit of sight seeing around San Francisco. Unfortunately, I came down with a double whammy of the flu/cold and bronchitis. Being ill the last couple of days of GDC were pretty miserable, but I was able to keep my head up for the rest of the week and try to enjoy what little I could....

Seems this past week I’ve been slammed with a ton of stuff. Had to take a breather, step back and get a bit more organized to gain some perspective. Tax season is in full swing, so that’s always biting at my ankles as this is my first year filing as a self-employed tax payer. Tilt to Live Viva la Coop is close to being live on the app store (hopefully), and HD will be followed up shortly after....

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....

Wow, last week was an intense week, focusing on pretty much Tilt to Live exclusively. Took a nice break/road trip up to North Carolina to do a bit of snowboarding to cap off the week. Conditions weren’t that great, but it was close, cheap, and still fun versus going back out to Colorado. Back today somewhat recharged and ready to go. Haven’t had time to work in Blitzmax at all last week, I hope that’ll change after this week as well....

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....