Daily Things

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. Now, note that this is a personal problem of mine since most people can still play hours and hours of those games even though they have dozens of them, but I’m pretty sure more feel the same. ...

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 Also feedback on the new layout is most appreciated. ...

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. Around one year ago (Feb 2010) when I started developing our first game it was all great, new stuff every day, things starting to work, replacing my crappy programmer art by Rita’s drawings. The real endurance was after we had a working demo, and the decision of actually finishing the game. ...

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. Developing Vizati turned out a much more complex task that I imagined, making everything from the ground up, from engine to the actual game for 5 different platforms took me around 3x more time that I expected. Valuables lessons were learned so I’d be a fool to repeat those mistakes again. ...

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. This is really great since I don’t have a device and I can now test the game properly and use it for future games development. The Kinect is also great but I more excited on using it for my own projects that actually playing it (geek). ...

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. ...

I don’t usually write reviews about games, maybe mostly because I don’t play as often as I used to. Most games today are just graphics graphics, I use super shader ray-traced lights but I forgot gameplay because I’m a tech demo. I grew up with a Super Nintendo playing Super Mario World and Zelda A Link to the Past, yeah shocker, no Spectrum to me :P, so I’m 2D gameplay type lover. ...

Engine/Framework considerations I’m currently struggling with the decision of dropping or not XNA support for PC and just keeping it for WP7 and Xbox360 (if XBLIG ever comes to Portugal). Why? Well one of the reasons is for porting purposes. Took me too long to port Vizati from C# to C++ and then having to implement an OpenGL render layer. If I had an C++/DirectX engine from the start it would be a question of replacing the rendering stuff to OpenGL. Or maybe just using OpenGL for Windows as-well. ...

Finally and after several weeks locked inside Different Pixel “dungeon” making my engine compatible with iOS, namely with iPhone/iPod touch I submitted today my first App to the Apple Store. The binary didn’t reported any issues so as of 15 September 2010 it’s “Waiting For Review” I have mixed feelings about either it’s going to be approved or rejected. On one hand we tested as much as we could, handed to some testers using iPhone 3, iPhone 4 and iPod touches. The only issues reported were usability or with game logic itself. No one reported any crashes, so I’m a little reassured on that part. On the other hand I’ve heard and read some major horror stories surrounding the submission process. Crashes that you can’t reproduce, people resubmitting same build again after failure being accepted, meaning that something is wrong there. Right now it’s a shot in the dark… ...