Antair Games An independent game developer blog

Sneezies for the iPhone is really coming together. It was looking like I’d have a rest day yesterday while Craig was finishing up some artwork, but I ended up finding something to burn up my whole day all the same.

At some point I should write something meaty about the joys of working in different time zones, but here’s a taste while I feel like talking about it. Craig is in LA, I’m in the UK. It’s very handy, it means that many days we both have something new to do or to comment on when we get up in the morning. We also have a nice little crossover when I’m still going and he’s just getting started. The end of his day is a little more awkward, because unless I get online late at night (I usually do, but it’s still only late afternoon his time), he has to wait until he gets up the next morning to get any quick feedback from me.

The office is almost right in the middle, in NY. There Andrey and Ania have been working on the Asteroid Jane port. That’s coming together too. As it turned out, I wasn’t as necessary to that team as we originally thought, so I’ve still been able to focus on Sneezies most days.

The NY vs UK timezone also works quite well. I have the mornings completely free to work on anything we might clash on, and because they come online mid-afternoon I can catch up with them and still wrap up for the day at a reasonable time. It doesn’t usually pan out like that, but the theory is nice. Also, I can catch them at the end of their day if I’m online later at night.

Anyway, bottom line is that being in different timezones is like having magical elves working on your stuff while you sleep. It’s awesome to get up in the morning and find something new has been done. But it sucks to be in the early slot, because the temptation to check in late at night is way too high. The other guys probably don’t have that, because they know I’m sleeping in their evening.

Oh, also this week, another of my remaining old gig obligations passed by, and another couple of  milestones. One was watching a large stack of old paperwork walk out the door to it’s new home, another was switching off my old email accounts. They’re still being monitored, but not by me. Awesome feeling.

— ELSEWHERE —

Started listening to the iPhone Games Network podcast. I found these guys via Veiled Games, apparently they were the best review site to deal with by some margin. I like the podcast a too, and hopefully it won’t be too long before I’m adding some of our games to their huge backlog of games for review :). Some big players are bound to emerge in the iPhone reviews space, hopefully the iPhone Games Network will be one of them.

There’s been some great iPhone development stuff on furbo.org lately, like this piece on how to test your final build. Lots of handy stuff that would take ages to figure out manually.

Depressing piracy figures for World of Goo. This hugely acclaimed indie game with no DRM, a low price, and a reasonable demo suffered from 90% piracy. Cliffski notes that his longer demo didn’t help either.

Just a quick note today. Quietly making good progress with the iPhone projects, you’ve probably noticed by now that I’m not really pushing the boundaries when it comes to sharing the ins and outs of the development process. Maybe I’m subconsciously trying to propagate the myth that you have an idea, a bunch of magic happens, and then you have a finished product. Or maybe I just don’t often feel like writing about that stuff.

Fortunately, others do, and I’m enjoying the greater range of information becoming available since the loosening of the iPhone NDA. I’ve been enjoying Jeff Lamarche’s iPhone Development blog, and the new blog from Veiled Games. Great stuff from both. How to thwart iPhone IPA crackers is also a great read, especially if you like a bit vitriol in your blogging (although, if you do, I’d quite likely wonder why you’re reading this one).

I’ve given up on Twitter for now, I’ll probably get a second wind once this hard working productive phase is over, but for now I’m not updating and I’m not following.

— ELSEWHERE —

Two awesome and meaty links for the weekend:-

Firstly, the design document from Grim Fandango. So cool. Full descriptions of all the puzzles, concept sketches, etc.

Secondly, Dan Cook at Lost Garden’s charming Princess Rescuing Application presentation slides. Distills the differences between the game experience and the app experience, and tries to show how much more wonderful the world of software would be if they got together.

Nothing much to report this week, we’re all just hard at work, and making great progress with the iPhone games.

I decided to ditch Thunderbird for my email. I had been using it since I got the Mac so I could use the same mail client in Windows and OSX… but I had so many issues with it. This morning, after failing to open a couple of attachments from Craig for about the 10th time this week, I moved everything over to Mac Mail. If you ever decide to do that, Google for the “Eudora Mailbox Cleaner”, it was the only way I could get a lossless import of mail folders.

The paper trail to release me from my previous business hit another milestone this week, which feels good. Another couple of commitments later this month and that should be completely sorted.

We only had one kid trick or treating this year, I guess we’ll have to eat that candy ourselves.

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This video of the old Prince of Persia motion capture footage is awesome. The jump is especially spooky:-

I think I’m better at eyeballing than the eyeballing game tells me, but I enjoyed it all the same.

We’re mostly working away on the iPhone version of Asteroid Jane, it’s coming together quickly. Craig’s busy with the graphics for Sneezies.

I’ve been using Jing and screencasts.com to send little videos of various in-progress stuff to Craig, and I can’t say enough good things about it. It’s so great being able to record, upload, share a video without having to mess around with files at all.

DoubleTake was on Gamedujour for a one day sale.

I finally worked up the enthusiasm to file my tax return, only to find that the online service is down for maintenance for the whole weekend. I guess I have to build myself up to that all over again.

— ELSEWHERE —

It’s maybe not quite Mad World, but the Gears 2 trailer is certainly awesome enough to get me in the mood.

Reflexive was bought by Amazon, interesting/potentially disruptive news for the casual games market. 

This superconductivity video is cool (if you don’t want to just assume it’s magic, there’s fact like stuff here).

DoubleTake is on Gamedujour today (10/22) at a rock bottom one day only price. I would have given you more notice, but we got bumped up at the last minute.

Our new server has been occupying and exciting Andrey in roughly equal quantities. (Scientifically based on the way WordPress is responding to me this morning, it rocks).

I’ve been drafted in to the Asteroid Jane iPhone version team, it’s always an experience revisiting code or a project when a little time has passed.

Revision 4 of Sneezies iPhone is starting to look a little more like we intended. Craig is hard at work on the art. The other ideas are still rolling around the office.

After weeks of disappointment, I finally got a game from my rental service that I really like, Civilisation Revolution. Enjoying this was the final confirmation that I’m completely out of touch with the kind of games I’m really into. I guess I’m in a difficult age related transition period. If not for that, and for Portal’s XBLA release next week, I’d almost certainly have bought Age of Booty, it’s great fun.

It’s that time of year when most British console gamers have to decide whether they’re FIFA or PES. It’s never been a tough choice for me, PES all the way, but last year’s version was disappointing. FIFA08 was the first one I’ve played that I didn’t hate, and this year looks like a difficult choice. If I base it on the demos, the FIFA 09 demo blew up in my face after about 20 seconds each time I tried it, whereas PES looks much prettier this time around, but the engine felt very similar. No clear winner there.

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I was looking forward to seeing how the new Xbox dashboard looks, but now I’m really looking forward to seeing how the community games thing works out (video embedded below).

Keith Alperin did an awesome job spreading the word and getting press coverage of his Mercury Mover application, and he’s shared his secrets here: Hacking the Press.

Apparently Multiwinia hasn’t been doing so well with the exposure, but has really good conversion rates. Check out this look at this plea from the developers: Save Multiwinia.

When it’s not going well, Productive Flourishing has some great tributes to failure to keep the positivity flowing :).

I found the Fustian Future blog last week, and I particularly enjoyed reading his motivation to go indie. Almost 10 years ago I threw myself into the indie life with similar reckless abandon, so it’s somehow comforting to read about others doing the same even during harsh economic times. No job, no contract, no product, no working on your business on the side for a couple of years… etc. It’s crazy, but that doesn’t make it any less awesome. You can only do it when you’re young, as time goes by it gets harder and harder, responsibilities pile up, and then your window is gone. I may have made a few mistakes along the way, but I’m glad I started when and how I did, and I hope it goes well for Yac.

Puppy games adopted Gravitron 2, and it looks very cool, I’ll definitely try it out next time I fire up Windows. I love the gravity based motion thing, could never get enough of it.

I had a great week working on the new iPhone games.

It’s also been great working more closely with Craig on the art, there’s a lot more back and forth communication.

Jing came in very useful this week, and I finally tried out the screencasts.com uploading. It’s a very slick and easy to record and share screen videos.

I bit the bullet and paid to have Adobe switch my CS3 license to the Mac.

A shiny new iPod Touch turned up, that’s been fun.

——– Elsewhere ———

I enjoyed Grey Alien Games’s¬†How to Succeed, it’s a good inspirational piece.¬†

Some good questions and answers in the¬†game producer’s roundtable discussion on GameProducer.

Demystifying the Creative Process is good stuff. Explains the various stages of the creative process, and tries to show why some people do it better than others, how to get better at it, etc.

The new prince of persia trailer looks great, glad they ditched the angst dark warrior look.

——– Finally ——–

Steam should be a great opportunity for indie game developers and gamers. It has the potential to allow developers more freedom to deviate from the demands of the big casual game portals, giving them access to a viable distribution channel for quirkier or different titles. Unfortunately, Steam don’t seem to be replying to many enquiries from indie developers, we’ve been unable to even get basic info or access to their much vaunted free SDK, never mind start a conversation about distribution. And we’re not alone, that’s why the guys at¬†mode7games¬†started this¬†petition¬†to “get more indie games on steam”. If you have a few minutes, please sign it.

Craig and I are officially taking a little time off the next PC/Mac game to try out some iPhone ideas.

I was right last week, I was getting a cold. Last weekend and the start of the week were pretty rough, but I’m cool now.

Our BlackBerry Video Slots game had a bit of a sales surge over the last week or two. I liked to think it had something to do with psychology and the global financial market, but most likely it was just down to some quirk of placement or promotion on one of the portals.

Cliffski released Kudos 2 this week. It’s always exciting to see the launch of a product when you’ve been following it on the developer’s blog.

Dan Cook of the wonderful Lost Garden posted this awesome Rules of Productivity Presentation. It’s all cleanly laid out and illustrated, well balanced and researched. Lots of slides about hours per day, and the effects of overtime, crunch, etc.¬†

This new blog from Eric Ries from IMVU, Startup Lessons Learned, is packed with good articles, definitely worth watching.

I signed up for this new social network for people interested in the business of software, created by Neil Davidson. Neil runs the Business of Software conference. I still don’t really get social networks, but I’m not much of a social animal in the real world, so I guess they do accurately mirror my real world interactions. Yes, you’ll find me alone in the kitchen of Facebook for the rest of the night! It’s probably worth a look if you like that kind of thing though, and Neil’s uploading some cool videos from the last conference (like this one).

Nintendo announced some cool stuff. A new DS, a WiiWare service for the new DS, direct SD storage of WiiWare and Virtual Console games on the Wii (always thought this would be a better option for the Wii than releasing an overkill hard drive, good choice Nintendo). My favorite news of all:-

[Embedded video of Punchout Wii]

Also big news this week, the iPhone SDK NDA is to be dropped (except for unreleased features), expect a massive glut of “get rich with iPhone development” books to trigger a whole new gold rush any day now :).

It’s been a while since I wrote about my transition over to the Mac, which you can probably take as an indication of how smoothly it’s gone.

I have very few issues with the Mac now, I’m getting the hang of the whole cmd vs ctrl thing, except when I have to spend time in Windows. I still have a few issues quickly typing special characters with the keyboard, but I think that’s mostly down to spending a few years with the same compact laptop keyboard, I think I’d have be having that same issue with any new keyboard. One of the happiest days in the last few weeks was when I found these instructions to enable home, end, page up and page down in most Mac software. That made everything so much easier for me.

I’m enjoying working in Xcode, Objective-C, Cocoa, I’ve found the transition very smooth so far. We’re already about half way into our next PC/Mac game in C++ using the same framework as DoubleTake, so I won’t be making a full time transition to Obj-C/Cocoa anytime soon, but any side projects will most likely be Mac natives… and there is always the iPhone projects :).

I feel like I’ve tried more software since I got the Mac than I had in years on the PC. The other day I was trying to find some nice graphics software I’d feel comfortable with. My primary tool on Windows is Fireworks, which if you haven’t used it is an unusual mix of vector and bitmap graphics, with great tools for slicing, exporting and optimizing images. Even though Photoshop is better for bitmap work, and Illustrator is better for vector work, I’ve always found myself most comfortable in the middle ground with Fireworks. I still have it on Windows, and the upgrade fees are putting me off transferring the licenses to the Mac for now.

My search for an alternative didn’t go well. First up I tried Gimp and Inkscape, both open source, they do a pretty good impression of Photoshop and Illustrator respectively, but they both use X11, and it feels uncomfortable using them on the Mac. The conventions are more like Windows, in terms of where the menus are, and in that they use ctrl instead of cmd for shortcuts. The weirdest thing with Gimp was that it makes no effort to copy Photoshop’s keyboard shortcuts, which seemed like a missed opportunity. So Gimp is useful for basic graphics tasks and Inkscape is useful for vector based stuff, but I didn’t feel at all at home in either of them.

I tried a few commercial options too. I liked Pixelmator a lot, but it lacks a few basics (like an info window) that make it a bit awkward to work with. If it was a little further along I think I would have found it an adequate replacement for Photoshop. I also liked VectorDesigner, but I didn’t spend as much time with it. But everything is either like Photoshop or like Illustrator, and I only ever feel truly at home in Fireworks, so it looks like I’m stuck for now. If I could some how mash Pixelmator and VectorDesigner together, and add in support for slicing and exporting, then I’d possibly have a new best friend…

But all this doesn’t really have a lot to do with a Windows guy trying to switch over to the Mac.

One nice thing I found out today is that the USB port on my Mac keyboard will support a Wacom tablet in OSX. When I connect it to the keyboard in Windows it claims the hub doesn’t have enough power and refuses to mount the device.

I was using the super simple TortoiseSVN for Subversion on Windows, so it was a bit of an adjustment to get to grips with the terminal svn commands on the Mac, but after making a little bit of an effort with it instead of just bitching to Andrey about it, I’m getting the hang of it. It’s quicker and easier really, for the day to day stuff.

I was having to switch over to windows to watch some football that was streaming in Windows Media format, because my Mac was refusing to connect to it. It must just have been an issue with the authentication or something on that site with Safari though, because it seems to work fine in FireFox.

One thing that’s really hit me about using the Mac is how much faster it starts up. Remember when you first switched from dial-up to broadband and you had that realization that you could click on video links or pdf files without being stuck waiting. It felt like that for me with the sleeping Mac vs the hibernated PC. I press a key and it’s right there to use instantly, it means I often use it to quickly check something online when before I might not have bothered.

That’s all I can think of for now.