A couple of weeks ago, Whitaker Trebella’s fun puzzle game Polymer was launched on the App Store. I bought the game and played it quite a bit that week. I decided that it was a game that people who enjoyed my game Charmed might also really like, so I asked Whit if he would like [...]
If you’ve read my blog recently, you might recall that I made a New Year’s resolution not to work on any other games until Unicorn Rush had shipped. While I have not spent any time actually coding any other games, I have cheated a bit, as I’ve spent a few hours here and there organizing [...]
Wow! 2011 is almost over and 2012 is just around the corner! I simply cannot believe that another whole year has passed! Looking back on my goals for 2011, I achieved only two of them, and that was in the first month of the year. Since then, although I have been quite busy, there has [...]
I recently submitted version 1.16 of Charmed to the App Store, which included a new OpenFeint version, and a new Tap Me SDK version. In addition, this was the first version of Charmed to be built under any version of Xcode 4.x. Everything seemed to go smoothly with the submission and it was soon posted [...]
Back when the iPhone 4 came out I created a nice little flashlight app, as I expected it would be a popular utility and a pretty easy one to create. I didn’t own an iPhone 4 though, so I had to send ad hoc builds to a friend of mine to test if it was [...]
Dear Steve, Despite the fact that I never had the opportunity to meet you, you’ve had a big impact on my life, particularly over the past 5 years. You were taken from us far too young, but it is amazing what you accomplished during your time with us. I truly appreciate the hard work and [...]
Monetizing Your Apps With In-App Purchases This week I am writing about all the ways I’ve seen that developers are monetizing their apps and games using in-app purchases (IAP), as well as some of the questions you will want to ask yourself before deciding to use IAPs in your game or app. [...]
As indie developers, we often wear many hats during the course of developing an app or game. Over the past two years or so, one of the hats I’ve worn more than I expected was that of “Photoshop user”. My background is software development. I have limited artistic skills when it comes to putting pen [...]
This week I wrote some code to add statistics to Unicorn Rush. Basically I wanted to keep track of things like distance run, number of jumps, number of fireballs shot, etc. I will use these stats later to present the user with specific objectives within the game and reward him/her for reaching them. Conceptually, tracking [...]
When I first thought of the idea for Unicorn Rush, I envisioned it mainly as an endless running game. The more I thought about it though, the more I felt it should also have hand-crafted levels, which I call Gauntlets in the game, that provided more of a challenge than a randomly generated game could [...]
