So I’m using OpenAL to do the audio in Tilt to Live. Over the course of development audio became the bottleneck of my game, both in size and in performance. The following could help you if you’re experience audio performance issues and are somewhat new to OpenAL. Let me preface this with: Don’t blindly optimize. Measure, Measure, MEASURE! Know what your bottleneck is before trying to tune code! Don’t make more than 32 sources objects in OpenAL....
We’re extremely close to submitting our first title “Tilt to Live“. We plan on submitting it this upcoming Friday. After a long and grueling (but awesome fun!) development cycle we’ve learned a ton. I figured an interesting way to distill our new found knowledge it would be in very short “dev tips” for developing an iPhone game. Today I start out with audio: Compressing Audio By the end of development our game weighed in at 16 MB....
I’ve received a few e-mails now regarding this tutorial that was hosted on Ziggyware’s site. So here’s a quick post to help others save some time and give an update on it’s status: Ziggyware.com seems to be down indefinitely. As a temporary solution until I get back around to hosting this tutorial myself you can find the Google cached version of it here. If you wish to look at the sample code and illustrations in full you can download the XNA sample from my site here....
I had seen a few things written about “Everyday the same dream“, a game created by but never took the time to try it out myself until recently. It’s a compelling art game where you try to subvert you’re daily routine. It took me a few minutes to figure out what to do after a few days of the mundane routine, but that added to the whole experience of the game itself....
So we’re at the last mile (it’s a long mile..) of development on Tilt To Live. Adam and I are starting to get some pre-release buzz built up around the game as we put our finishing touches into place. With the holidays around the corner, I will be out of commission until mid January. Marketing is a whole other beast we’re trying to deal with and learn as we go. With a market as vicious and saturated as the App Store, it’s been one challenge after another!...
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It’s been a while since my last post. As things started entering crunch mode and the whole holiday rush was happening I unfortunately let my blogging schedule slip as a result. It’s still going to be irregular for the next month or so as I’m trying to finish up Tilt To Live. The official Tilt To Live site has launched with a few screenies and more info though! It’s a basic info site at the moment, but I’ll be sprucing it up as time goes on....
…looks like I’ll be hitting a bit of crunch time in the coming weeks. Blog entries will probably be dwindling over the next month or so as I try to put the finishing touches on Tilt To Live. On that note: No matter how much energy you feel like you have and no matter how motivated you are at seeing a project to the end, you still need to take breaks from it....
As I’m zeroing in on finishing Tilt To Live some of the bigger assets are coming through from Adam and the game size has grown a lot faster than it has in past few months. One of the unstated goals of mine was to keep the game under 10 MB. Why? You are not allowed to download apps, podcasts, or videos that are larger than 10 MB over 3G. You are required to connect to wi-fi in order to do it on your iPhone....
I’ve made some serious progress as of late with Tilt To Live. The age old saying “I’m 90% done…” is rearing its head and yet it feels like there’s 90% more to go! This is a bit regurgitated, but saw an interesting bit in a post on burnout and motivation at Zen Habits: 1. Achieve in increments. When you only focus on a big goal someday, it’s easy to get burned out by the daily grind....