idevblogaday

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 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....

It’s been hellishly busy as of late, as I’m knee deep in Tilt to Live HD. Now on with my quick blurb: This tip is kind of a “duh” much in the same way version control software is for most developers. The thing is I still meet a lot of developers who don’t use any form of version control. And automated builds simply weren’t even in my own tool set initially....

It’s been busy, busy, busy as of late. We’re in full swing trying to get Tilt to Live HD ready for the iPad. It’s looking amazing thus far and plays a lot better than just the 2x mode for the original Tilt to Live. Frostbite mode just went out the door a few days ago, and the response has been positive so far. We’ve been getting some responses from users saying the game has become too easy in the other modes....

While I was working at a day job for the past couple of years I was gobbling up any info I could find on going fully independent and the what it takes not only from a business perspective, but what you have to change about your personal life, ideals, and expectations in order to make it sustainable. One of things that stuck out a lot was managing my burn rate. Minimizing the amount of money leaving my account wasn’t just a matter of not buying a Starbucks coffee (I don’t even drink coffee, but you get the idea)....

Ahh, my first idevblogaday post! For those that don’t know, idevblogaday is a group of indie dev bloggers started by Miguel Á. Friginal of @mysterycoconut games to get developers blogging more regularly. So we’ll see how that goes :]. After finishing the initial release of Tilt to Live I had been wanting to gather up my thoughts on what I had learned about making a game that is heavily dependent on accelerometer controls....