Bytesize Adventures

We’ve all started work on games only to abandon them part the way through. There can be many reasons for this but for me it’s usually because they just aren’t fun to play or were too ambitious. My iPhone game graveyard is the place where all of my abandoned games are laid to rest (or put on indefinite hold). One day I may mutter some incantations to resurrect some of them, or even pieces of them, but generally speaking they are dead and buried. I’m about to lay another game to rest so I thought now would be a good time to share my iPhone game graveyard with you, along with the various reasons for its undead residents. keep reading…

By Chris | Posted in: Design, Development Diary, Tangents | Tags: cancelled games, colour mix, explorer, iDevBlogADay, interactive fiction, personalities, puppet, spinit, text adventure
11 Comments »

I’m going to make a sweeping, possibly inaccurate, generalisation. Modern games are highly derivative, boring, and predictable. They nearly always involve some form of shooting; be it people, robots, zombies, or indeed anything that moves. They are set in the same environments we have seen a million times before; WWII, SciFi, or Fantasy settings. Now, if this is something I feel, I’m sure at least one other person out there must feel the same.

As game developers/designers, this is our source material. This is where we gather our inspiration and “research” our next big game. keep reading…

By Chris | Posted in: Design, Tangents | Tags: iDevBlogADay, inspiration, retro
3 Comments »

Last week a great blog post, followed by a seemingly innocuous tweet from @mysterycoconut, escalated into what is now known as iDevBlogADay. The concept is fairly straightforward; Every day a developer (or two) will post on their blog. We all have an allotted day so that there is at least one blog post published every day of the week. @mysterycoconut has done a great job of organising it with the #idevblogaday hashtag, a twitter list for the participants, and even an aggregated RSS feed of all the blogs. There’s a wide variety of developers joining in – Scroll to the bottom of this page to see the roster.

We’ve already had great posts from Game from Within, Acorn Heroes, Retro Dreamer, Rizer Games and Québarium. For my post I wanted to cover something I’ve been meaning to write about for some time…
keep reading…

By Chris | Posted in: Design, Development Diary, Tangents | Tags: beginner, code, Design, graphics, iDevBlogADay, iphone development, opacity, photoshop elements, project management, sound, xcode
5 Comments »

There was a time when anyone who asked me “What will you be in life?” received the rather confident and totally serious answer “I’ll be an Artist”. I studied Art at college you see. In fact I recently stumbled across some photos of my old college artwork, including a rather disturbing 6 foot tall crucifix! (Photographs of said artwork are embedded below; more for nostalgia than anything) Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that I made a mistake or even that I was particularly good at Art – it’s just that I was so certain.

Somewhere along the line fate intervened and I ended up in software development. Whilst i’m certainly out of practice, my creative streak has never really left me. However, I now find myself increasingly frustrated that skills I once possessed have become dulled. “Get to the point” I hear you cry. Ok, scroll on past the pictures… keep reading…

By Chris | Posted in: Design, Tangents | Tags: art, nostalgia, sketchbook project
3 Comments »