Games Crow by Sunside Inc Hadn’t heard much about this iOS title until last week. Great stuff. A Few Feet of Snow by Martin Wallace So want this deck-building card game. Out of stock in the UK at the moment unfortunately. Sine Mora by Grasshopper Manufacture and Digital Reality This XBLA side-scrolling shooter is so beautiful it might just keep my attention long enough to figure out how to play one of these things properly. Design Permanent Record – The Paradox of Online Worlds Outline of the issues around designing for permanency and user consequence. Rational Design: The Core of Rayman […]
Not done this for a while… here’s a bunch of stuff I’ve come across in the last week or so. Games Home by Benjamin Rivers Hauntingly beautiful pixel horror adventure. Dyad by Shawn McGrath Didn’t quite get to see this at GDC. Wish I had. Lone Survivor by Jasper Byrne More pixel horror — this one’s out already though. Offspring Fling by Kyle Pulver Just in case your twitter stream didn’t explode with this Friday night — go check it out. Design Controls You Can Feel Slides & notes from Zach Gage’s outstanding GDC 2012 talk on touch tactility. Mirror’s Edge: Building the impossible […]
I’m going to be at GDC next week. If you fancy coffee, wine, food and/or whatever let me know. I’ll be giving early demos of Dead West to those who are interested as well — we’re looking at distributing alpha-like demos the week after GDC so what I’ll be showing is the very last stages of getting to that point. Given we only got round to the writing code for this thing in the last 5 weeks, we’re doing pretty well 
Give me a shout by email gareth@36peas.com, or twitter @36peas. In related news, we just put up a […]
Dead West went into full production last week — it’s been a while getting to start on this one, but fortunately we’re way ahead on the art production side. First demos will be around the time of (and at) GDC early March. In the meantime an update on other stuff and some of our latest characters and level background style updates… Another Hyperion update was submitted last night — it features an in-game tutorial and tips system. Great for both new and experienced players. Watch for that hitting the App Store — we’re dropping the price at the same time. […]
I presented this at Develop Liverpool yesterday — similar to what I did at 360idev Devner back in September. Note: SlideShare seems to have had some kind of fit with the title slides. I really don’t repeat myself that much 
A lot of the salient parts were made by me vocally. As far as I’m aware there wasn’t a recording — and I don’t have notes, but you should get the general idea from the slides above. There’s also a great write-up by Keith Andrew over at PG.BIZ.
Abstract, summary and conclusion all in one Venn for the impatient: And, actually, I’m kind of impatient too. So here’s some some shortform notes on what I was thinking about when the above popped into my head. We named it wrong — it’s not “free” at all. It’s just another way of try before you buy This is not a post about shitty energy system time management games interactive experiences * I would write Free 2 Play… but I was reliably informed at GDC Online that the term is trademarked by K2 Network — in a talk, by them, about the […]
When I was preparing resources for the talk I did on component architectures for game development at 360idev in Denver earlier this month I came across a post on blackboard data storage over at the excellent AIGameDev. In this post I’ve outlined a couple of ways this kind of data storage can be used alongside component-based stores for global state and shared data. Background and context to date To date we’d been sharing global data using one of the following methods: The GameWorld’s local store (a dictionary) Properties on the GameWorld object itself In-component referencing / lookups These have […]
Want to take a look at a component architecture in practice? Attend my talk at 360idev yesterday and want the code I promised? Have no idea what object composition is? Awesome — this is just for you then. We use a pretty lightweight component architecture for our iOS projects. It looks exactly like the structure above. Game World — container for game objects; entry point for broadcast messaging, update loops, cleanup messaging and object removal Game Object — container for components (or behaviours as we actually call them in code); parse for loading objects from templates; proxy for messages, loops […]
Something of a sneak peak in this how-to post for 36peas and the idevblogaday site… we just finished work on the trailer for our upcoming iPad title Hyperion: d7. It took us about 4 hours (the trailer, that is — the game took about 4 months), was a lot of fun and actually works pretty [...]
This is not comprehensive, cohesive or in any particular order. However, it is full of juicy ideas on how to monetize your stuff. We’ve been discussing this recently in the context of a new project – you might also find our recent posts on the production/promotion balance and launch-marketing an iOS/iPad title useful. 1. Subscriptions [...]
