This weekend I attended AltDevConf, an online game development conference. Their aim is to break down the geographical, and financial, barriers that prevent people from attending game conferences and provide free content from leading experts. AltDevConf is a spin-off of AltDevBlogADay, a blogging website setup by Mike Acton to encourage game professionals to blog more [...]
This blog has been going for well over 2 years now. Its purpose is to chronicle my game development efforts and hopefully to share some insights with you. 2009 and 2010 were both productive years. Now, with 2011 officially over, its time to take a look at what I achieved in 2011 and what I [...]
In my last post I said that I would be sketching out ideas for my next game over a series of posts. This hasn’t happened and in addition to that I’ve missed an entire post. At the risk of turning this into another horrendous iDevBlogADay post about failed promises and lack of time – I’ll [...]
Foreword: Today, I, like the rest of the world, woke up to the sad news that Steve Jobs had passed away. It always takes you by surprise when you feel deep sadness at the passing of someone you didn’t know personally. The thing is, for all of its millions of people, the world can feel [...]
6 months, 5,000 lines of code, 13 blog posts, 15,000 words and both the App and my blog series are finally finished. When I started this I planned on following a carefully designed and documented process to translate my App store idea into an actual product. Along the way my aim was to share all [...]
My App Development series is nearly wrapped up. I want to spend the next two posts sharing some data with you and dissecting the project. For this post, we’ll focus on the results of my marketing efforts and I’ll share my sales data with you – warts and all!. Launch day Coffee Cellar has been [...]
I first heard about Composition No. 1 through another book, Twisty Little Passages, which examines the history and impact of Interactive Fiction (Including the humble text adventure). Owing to it’s rarity I never expected to actually own a copy, but here it is – beautifully re-imagined, for a new audience, by Visual Editions. The first [...]
Whilst I’m brainstorming ideas for my next game, I’ve decided to take a slight diversion into the world of application development. My reasons for doing this are two-fold. Firstly, I’d like to expand my knowledge of core iPhone development (i.e. the interface builder and core API’s). Secondly, I’d like to see how the iPhone application [...]
I’m currently working on the first free update for Astro Noughts. As such, the majority of my posts are likely to stem from issues/findings relating to that. This brings me to this weeks #iDevBlogADay article… Game Difficulty. I’ll start by saying that I dislike difficulty settings in games. In fact, I dislike game settings in [...]
For my iDevBlogADay article this week, I’ve written a postmortem of my latest game Astro Noughts. I’m using the traditional format of 5 things that went right and 5 things that went wrong. What Went Right 1. Scope To date, my most prevalent game development enemy has been that of scope. Feature creep has played [...]
