Antair Games An independent game developer blog

One of the secret side projects we’ve been involved in hit this last week, AppTees was launched. I’m excited about this, and we have some great shirt ideas in mind.

I didn’t bookmark any new Sneezies reviews this week, but sales have stayed a little higher than they were since the Lite version hit. Probably getting towards time to do a little update on the Lite version experience, but there’s not really a lot to say. “It helped.” would be the gist of it.

We were excited this week because we had a run at the top of the paid App Store charts in Russia, the final validation we needed for the Big In Russia t-shirt :).

Big personal indie milestone coming up next weekend. I’ve been pre-occupied by it, I’ll be glad when it’s passed.

My TV and Wii were re-united this week when I returned to Mario Galaxy. I bought a 360 shortly after Galaxy came out, and was seduced by the shiny HD… I don’t have a lot of time to play these days, but I plan to make up for my sins. With my failing thumbs, and the fiendish difficulty that hides behind Mario’s bright visuals, it could keep me busy for the rest of the year.

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So many good iPhone articles this week. I won’t write much about any of them, it would take ages and they all speak for themselves.

Our good buddy David Frampton, developer of runaway App Store success Chopper, was interviewed by AppCraver. Well worth a read.

Jason Citron, co-founder of Aurora Feint, started a blog. Based on his first post, about mitigating gameplay confusion, it looks like it’s going to be good. Add it to your feed reader.

Two great posts from Craig Hockenberry, the first one is about raising prices. The second, Bootstrap, is a great overview of getting started in iPhone development. What to read, what you need, all that stuff in one place, bookmark it for beginners.

Rob LeFebvre wrote a nice piece this week on his personal blog about the satisfaction and positive feeling that working on The Portable Gamer gives him. It’s a nice thing to read, and it’s always worth remembering why we do this (aside from making a living) and the things we get out of it. I get a lot of pleasure from linking to and talking about the things that other great developers are writing and doing, and out of side projects like the Bake Off and AppTees that aim to bring indie devs together and increase awareness.

Gogogic have been rocking their blog lately, and their latest gem is 10 things to do before creating your first iPhone game.

To finish, two similar, but both interesting articles from two guys I enjoy chatting with, and who I hope everything works out for. Mike Kasprzak, whose Smiles games is one of the best things available on the iPhone, wrote his cheerfully blunt road map. In it, he discusses how things are going for Smiles, and tries to figure out where to take it next. As advertised, it’s blunt and honest, and that always makes for a good read. I’ve got a lot of respect for Mike’s position, he’s held strong with the $4.99 price tag on his game, which is clearly worth it, when he could easily have flinched and yo-yo’d the price all over the place. Owen Goss is in a similar situation with his new game, Dapple, and he writes about it in No one said it would be easy.

So there, as I said, a lot of good stuff this week…