Posts

Despite the good advice on just using a library or someone else’s solution to getting game center working, sometimes I’m just stubborn. Well it wasn’t actually completely stubbornness as it was more of a “don’t have an alternative” situation. Tilt to Live uses AGON for it’s leaderboards and awards system. It has served us well and never faltered. Despite that, Game Center has arrived to rain on it’s parade so-to-speak. To give TTL hopefully more life in the long run I decided to implement Game Center alongside AGON over the past week....

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....

We sent off Tilt to Live HD to Apple for review today. I couldn’t send it off until around 3 PM today because my internet was down (since 6 AM) due to a less then stellar ISP here in Alabama. *sigh*. But that won’t get me down, I’m super excited that TTL HD will be on the ipad app store in a few short weeks! Right now I’m busy trying to cut and edit footage together for a launch trailer....

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....

I recently made a post on our official OML blog about what Adam and I are playing. Taking a look at that list you’ll find that the vast majority of games I play are multiplayer oriented. A lot of biases, inspirations, and design decisions that go into my game designs are influenced by multiplayer games. When we set out to start One Man Left, my long term goal for the company (beyond making fun games we like to play) was to be known for making fun multiplayer indie games for whatever platform we develop for....

So I’m currently playing around with some multiplayer prototypes on the iphone, and when it came down to testing stuff I ran into a problem: You can’t deploy to multiple devices at the same time. Yea it’s not exactly a ‘problem’ per say, but it’s certainly tedious doing a ‘build and run’ on the devices you want to test. So much so that I dropped 3 player support in a prototype just to save time....

I had an issue where several international users were reporting that the game was crashing. As it turns out, using an NSNumberFormatter would return a weird character to display as the grouping separator. This would be all good and dandy, but the problem lies in the fact that I’m using bitmap fonts to render, and the look-up failed causing a hard crash. In Tilt to Live’s case, this was in regards to how number grouping symbols are displayed in different locales....

After responding to Noel’s post on the size of games I soon learned it was a wide effort by developers to post their thoughts on this topic so I figured I’d throw my hat into the ring. I’ve had this topic in my head for a very long time and it’s been frustrating hearing friends’ and reviewers’ opinions on games. Other developers have covered this pretty well already so not sure what else I can contribute beyond just a rant :P....

I spent this past weekend getting retina display graphics implemented in Tilt to Live for iPhone 4. The cynic in me hates the marketing term ‘retina graphics’ because on the production side, it’s simply just a bigger image. But I guess you do need a name for it, and since ‘HD’ has already been bastardized on the iPad I guess this will do. I decided to write this post to bring a bit of awareness to some of the process of updating your OpenGL game for the retina displays if you choose to do so....