Antair Games An independent game developer blog

Things are returning to normal around here. We’re getting work done on our next game, settling into 2009.

We’re entering the last week of the The Great Indie Bake Off, added another wonderful cake, and created some banners to help spread the word. There’s still time to get in an entry and take away some great prizes. Get to it.

Sneezies got a nice new review from Touch My Apps. These were great guys to deal with, very responsive and interested, and they wrote a thorough review. Sneezies earned a “Grab It” badge, their second highest accolade, our goal now is to earn the coveted “Kiss it” badge with our next game!

We had a nice enquiry from a Sneezies player this week who wanted to know if she could buy poster prints of the backgrounds. It totally made our day, and we’re looking into it.

I got a free copy of Beginning iPhone Development in the mail from Jeff LaMarche this week (I was in the right place at the right time to help out with an iPhone development problem on Jeff’s blog). It looks like a good read, I’d definitely recommend checking it out if you’re just getting started. Actually, even if you’re not just getting started, it almost certainly covers some aspect of the SDK that you haven’t had to go near yet.

I’m still updating the blog way more often than I do during full steam development, I hope I’m not setting unrealistic expectations for new readers… 1 or 2 posts a week is normal around here. This week on the blog I reviewed Jing Pro, and explained why I’ve taken to FriendFeed.

Tweetbacks seemed to come out of nowhere and come together very quickly. These are like trackbacks from Twitter that appear with the comments on a blog post. I added them here using Dan Zarrella’s javascript service. Over the next week, I’m hoping to check out this new Wordpress version from Smashing Magazine which, I think, stores them on your own server and should hopefully speed things up. But the way this is going, that’ll be obsolete by the time I get a chance to look at it. In any case, if you’re on twitter and you tweet about one of my blog posts, you should see your tweet appear magically on the page.

Around the web this week, I enjoyed the Seven Deadly Sins for People Trying to Make Money online, from ShoeMoney, and this Grey Alien Games post about indie sales stats.

Shout outs to the success of two of our iPhone dev buddies this week, Tim Haines and his BurnBall game are currently featured in a TUAW article that hit the front page of Digg, and Up There from Veiled Games has been featured prominently by Apple in several territories.

Finally, Evan at Veiled Games, has thrown down the gauntlet and promised a development snapshot a day from their new game. I’m not crazy enough to challenge him at that rate, but I am willing to try to post something from our secret lair on a regular basis, maybe even once a week. I think we can manage that. First up:-

Our next game doesn’t have anything to do with pirates. As much as we thought we were going to love these guys when they were finished, their game just wasn’t good enough, so they got canned. We have to believe that our next game will be as good as or better than Sneezies, otherwise what are we doing here. We want to make a living, but we also want to love and respect what we’re doing, and that’s meant more than one project hitting the cutting room floor when it failed to measure up. 

We do like pirates, and Craig was enjoying the art style, so maybe we’ll revisit the theme in future, but for now this is a misleading graphic. I have been using these guys in a completely inappropriate fashion in the prototype of our next game though, so it’s not completely irrelevant.

In other news, the Invisible Shield for my iPod Touch dropped through the mail today, so hopefully I’ll share some experiences with that next week.