Daily Things

So being a big fan of Quake, Quake 3 Arena and Doom I was eager to get my hands on id Software latest game, Rage. Like most developers out there I’ve been impressed by John Carmack’s work and breakthroughs in gaming and computer graphics for years. When I first heard Rage was targeting 60FPS I got intrigued. Almost every game targets 30FPS and targeting twice as that leaves less time to render each frame, even more since they were promising vast wastelands, detailed characters, top notch animations and AI....

So I’ve been out for quite some time, and this is just a quick update. First, I have tones of unread, thus answered emails on my inbox. I haven’t managed to go through that lately. I usually scroll to see if there’s a really urgent one, I will eventually read them all. I decided to quit my current job, my last day is October 31st. I couldn’t glimpse a very promising carrier there and I practically staggered learning-wise for the past months due to the type of work we develop so yeah, that’s it....

First of all I think this is my last idevblogaday post for a while. I my math doesn’t fail me this is my 10th post and it’s time for someone to take turn. Actually it’s just the 9th. I hope my words have somehow enriched your knowledge, in case you want to stick around just bookmark my feeds. I keep this fairly updated. Also since I’ve been working on a new game...

So this is what we at Different Pixel, together with 5 other developers have been working on, the “Indie Summer Six Pack” Six indie titles for just $10 – or a stonking $5, if you first share the offer via Facebook. How can you say no to that? The games included are Aztaka, City Rain, Puzzlegeddon, Bob Came In Pieces, Vizati and Lylian.

A large percentage of the indie developers have to work on their project at night and/or weekends. In order to pay the bills they have to maintain a day job. There’s no shame in that, many do it, I do it, not everyone can make a mega jump right into fame and fortune with a single project. The rest of us mere mortals have to gradually build a fan base, learn from past mistakes, do better PR, etc....

This has been discussed on thousands of forums and people way smarter than me have given reasons why selling games at $0.99 on the App Store is the future and others why it will hurt gaming and developers. I’m giving my opinion as both a developer and a consumer. As a consumer As a consumer I feel like having thousands of games at that price and/or free makes me not appreciate any of them, there’s way too many and I usually get bothered easily....

Hum…some stuff happened lately, some I can’t go into detail right now others I can. I was talking with Rita the other days and she had this nice idea for an iPhone game. It’s one of those small concepts that may or not work but I liked the general idea, at least enough to start a small prototype. If everything turns out the way I plan (never is) it should be a 2-3 weeks project....

Spent a little time giving my blog a new look. It’s not that I didn’t like the old one but sometimes it was a bit of a mess, I’ve been getting many new readers so it was time for a cleaner look. My main concern was getting all code posts to be readable but I think they are class XPTO { public: XPTO(); }; Let me know if you find any errors, since I’m not going to dig up the whole blog finding errors =P...

I follow a couple of dev blogs, some are game developers, others make websites or software. In the last couple of months I’ve been reading a lot of them complaining about lack of motivation to develop their idea of the lack of motivation for development in general. Happens to me too, heck it happens to everyone once in a while… It’s something that happens usually half way though or after you get the initial prototype running....

So another year has come to an end, time to make plans for a new one and look back on what has been done. This was one crazy year, where I embraced indie development as my free time “hobby”. This picture illustrates my year very well, dark link is a bonus since my twitter handle is DJ_Link I’m tired, but happy and hoping that these were the first steps on something greater and bigger....

Yeahhh!!!! Just got an email a couple of hours ago confirming that Vizati for Windows Phone 7 won first prize on Microsoft XapFest. Here’s a link, be warned it’s in Portuguese, although it’s on the Microsoft official webpage I couldn’t figure out how to translate that to English on the website itself. Just use Google translate or so. This is great for us since Vizati has now 2 awards and this time the prizes are a Xbox360 + Kinect and a Windows Phone 7 device....

UPDATE: Pressure works, Microsoft backs down over XBLIG changes: http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/gaming/news/a286779/microsoft-backs-down-over-xblig-changes.html Let me start by saying that this is just a personal opinion, nothing more, nothing less. It was with great sadness that I saw what the latest update to the Xbox360 dashboard did to Xbox Indie Games See? XBLIG is now on the “Speciality Shops”, right next to Avatar Marketplace, not even worthy of being the Games section. Even if you search a XBLIG game there it won’t return any result....