First up, as is tradition (and by tradition I mean I’ve done it twice), a bit about the site.

One of my goals for 2011 was to revamp my website again (the fruits of which you are looking at now). Its important to me that the website reflects who I am and I’m fairly happy with it for the time being.

Stats-wise bytesizeadventures.com continues to go from strength to strength. Here are the visitor numbers for the whole of 2011…

28,604 visits from 18,669 unique visitors – both up 30% on last year.
48,773 pageviews – again, up 30% on last year.
368 visitors in a single day (at its highest point). This was 23rd September and coincided with my post “From Idea to App store in 6 months“.

Just to indulge myself and reflect upon that for a moment, over 18,000 individuals have visited this site in 2011. To me that’s incredible and acts as huge encouragement.

The 5 most popular posts of 2011 were as follows.

1. iPhone game development toolkit (An old post but still popular apparently)
2. 10 don’ts of iPhone game development
3. A beginners guide to iPhone game development
4. App development: The Testing
5. App development: The Wireframes

Honorable mention: From idea to App Store in 6 months (contains some of the most popular posts this year, bound to be favourites of 2012).

Moving on from website stats, I said I would do a lot of things in 2011. I anticipated more updates for Astro Noughts, 2 new games, and a new version of Brainwave. I’m not going to lie, you got none of that :)

Here’s what actually went down!

1) Coffee Cellar

My big project for 2011. Loads of words, loads of code, and loads of coffee!

Coffee Cellar was all about taking something I’m passionate about and producing a slick App from a simple idea. You can read about it in much more detail here.

Coffee Cellar has been my most successful iPhone App to date. Its hasn’t done amazingly well financially (I’m only about one sixth of the way towards that new espresso machine). However, Coffee Cellar has been mentioned in The Guardian’s App Rush feature, It’s been T3′s App of the day, Its also given me my first ever print magazine review in Tap! Magazine.

Not to mention some really nice coffee community coverage from the likes of coffee works, tasteologie, coffee-rock-thought, and mentions from coffee peeps on twitter.

I’ve already released 4 updates in 2011 (including the most recent Christmas update) and I have plans for further updates throughout 2012.

2) Rocket Santa Remix

In a last ditch attempt to produce something else in 2011, I totally re-wrote Rocket Santa from the ground up – adding game center integration, fancy particles effects, revamped gameplay, and totally new sound effects and music.

Rocket Santa Remix launched as free game on 5th December. It’s not intended to light the mobile games world on fire, its just a fun distraction that I like having around :)

Over Christmas its had a few hundred downloads.

3) Astro Noughts

Astro Noughts was my first iPad game and launched at the end of 2010. In 2011, I updated it with a new difficulty system as well as some improvements to the planetarium.

After playing around with a free promotion early in the year, I ultimately decided to make it permanently free late last year.

The Postmortem I wrote was featured on Gamasutra which was nice.

I don’t intend to keep updating Astro Noughts. It was a fun project and I’m happy with the game but it doesn’t hold any interest for me any more and its unlikely to ever be successful financially.

4) Attended a conference

In January I attended an indie game development conference called “World of Love 2″. Overall it was an interesting experience and one that I’d definitely repeat. Off the back of that conference I started One Eyed Cafe with a friend.

I take full responsibility for not producing anything worthwhile from that endeavour. Ultimately, I’m not quite ready for working on a joint game project – there are too many facets that I’m eager to learn for myself. One Eyed Cafe isn’t disbanded, it’s just parked for the time being.

5) Removed Rocket Santa and Star Fusion from sale

As I mentioned above, Rocket Santa was replaced with a revamped version. Star Fusion was my first attempt at iOS development. It was well past its prime, no longer worked correctly, and, at over 2 years old, I don’t want the upkeep.

Essentially I’m tweaking/housekeeping my iOS line-up. I now have 3 products – Coffee Cellar, Rocket Santa Remix, and Astro Noughts.

2012

2011 has taught me a lot. Its taught me about what I can achieve in a year. Its taught me even more about the App store and what its becoming. Its also made me re-evaluate what it is I want from this (this currently being a hobby). As a result, here are my plans for 2012.

1) Release one new game.

2) Continue updating Coffee Cellar.

That’s it!

That is my realistic, streamlined plan for 2012. I’m in this to write games because I like writing games. The time has come to produce something that’s a little more ambitious than my previous efforts. I’m putting aside the pressures of trying to turn a profit to instead focus on producing a game that I can be proud of. This means I need time. Joyfully, 2012 has popped up and looks like an ideal amount of time for such an endeavour.

Oh yeh, I’m getting married in 2012 too – its going to be an awesome year!

Owing to it’s rarity I never expected to actually own a copy, but here it is – beautifully re-imagined, for a new audience, by Visual Editions.

The first thing that hits you upon opening the box, containing the 150 pages that comprise this piece of work, is bemusement. Composition No. 1 flies in the face of our conventional understanding of how to consume a piece of literature. The most obvious way that this manifests itself is through its unbound pages.

The idea is that you shuffle the pages to create your own story – a quick factorial calculation (150!) reveals 3.8089226376305687e+260 unique combinations (that’s a lot) or, as its more elegantly framed in the introduction, 150 different beginnings with 149 possible endings.

You really need to hold the physical stack of pages, first-hand, in order to feel the overwhelming instinct to leave them in the order they are already in. If you can fight this paralysing instinct, you may find that you come out of the other side, as I did, with a devilish desire to wreak havoc on that neat stack and shuffle the pages into your own chaotic mess of literature.

The challenges to convention don’t end with the shuffling of pages. On closer inspection you’ll realise that Composition No. 1 has no page numbers, no chapters, and doesn’t have a beginning, middle, or end. Each page is intended as a short piece of writing that can be read in isolation but that, when combined with its siblings, tells a greater story.

As you finish reading your first page you are confronted with another assault on convention. What do you do with the pages you have read? Do you create a separate pile or simply put them to the back? They don’t have numbers to mark them so, if you put them to the back, how will you know you’ve reached the end – does it even matter?

I haven’t mentioned the story yet, and I’m not going to. That would spoil it. It’s part of the mystery, that information about the story itself is difficult to find. Besides, this piece of interactive fiction focuses on the separated pages rather than the story it has to tell – it challenges conventions.

As you can see from the images in this post, the Visual Editions version of this book is beautiful to behold. Striking contrasting colours adorn the sturdy, well cut box. At fist I was unsure about the weight of the paper (I felt a thicker stock would allow for more shuffling), but then I realised that this would make the book difficult to handle and would remove the work too far away from the concept of a book. It’s the very fact that the pages feel like a standard novel that creates the disconcerting feeling.

In the box there’s an introduction from Tom Uglow (Creative Director for Google & Youtube) that does a good job of introducing you to the book and its relevance in a modern society. I understand that the original book has a brief explanation on the inside of the box that has you assume a role – I think this may have been a nice inclusion but it certainly doesn’t detract from the experience.

(A little bit of internet research reveals the text from the original book – I’ve stripped out the elements that reveal the books premise)

“The reader is requested to shuffle these pages like a deck of cards; to cut, if he likes, with his left hand, as at a fortuneteller’s. The order the pages then assume will orient X’s fate.

For the time and order of events control a man’s life more than the nature of such events…

..Whether the story ends well or badly depends on the concatenation of circumstances. A life if composed of many elements. But the number of possible compositions is infinite.”

One of the coolest aspects of the Visual Edition version are the text patterns on the back of each page. When laid flat and looked at from a little distance, they look like three dimensional landscapes rising out of the page.

As if the physical book weren’t enough, there’s even an iPad version of the book. I’d encourage you to buy the real thing though.

Overall its a really nice piece of work. It questions the way we approach reading and provides an element of interaction. It’s not intended to revolutionise the book as we know it, it’s merely intended to make you stop and think about tried and tested conventions, and in this it succeeds.

Time for a new interactive fiction project? I think so…

I decided to post my question on Twitter and as usual got a brilliant and varied response. In the interests of sharing, I’m going to post the suggestions here.

• Trac (one person is also using ProjectLocker to host this which includes SVN/GIT integration)
• Simplenote and Moleskine combo
• Google Docs Spreadsheets
• Email & SVN
• FogBugz (This offers a free startup account)
• OmniFocus
• Redmine (locally hosted via Bitnami RubyStack)
• ProjectPier

(Note: These are tools that indie developers are actually using, as apposed to tools they’ve tried and discarded)

Thats a lot of tools to try. Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments and I’ll add them to the list.

Astro Noughts is my latest iPad game. It’s an arcade number crunching game with, what I consider to be, a fairly unique concept. You can read a postmortem here (it was also featured on Gamasutra). I released Astro Noughts on 14th December 2010 – incredibly bad timing since there were a large number of high profile, kick-ass games released at exactly the same time (and EA decided to play hard ball). Despite the bad timing Astro Noughts sold 16 copies on its first day – you might consider this terribly low but I consider it a success. Sales bounced around for a while but by the end of January this year they had petered out to precisely 0 sales every day. That’s where it has remained, receiving 0 sales for the past 2 months.

Also in that time I have released a number of updates to improve the game and add value. I’ve also attempted to keep a thread alive on Touch Arcade. I had some coverage here and there but ultimately my attempts to court the media have failed miserably.

It was clear that I needed to do something, but what? I went FREE that’s what. Here’s how it went down…

Why Free

I’ve dabbled with Free before on my other games without much success. The general idea is that you make your game free for a period of time. During that time you are trying to get as much exposure as possible so that, when you make the game paid again, it takes off through word of mouth. Alternatively Apple may notice it rise up the charts and opt to feature it. Either way, you’ll increase your user base which increases future exposure from updates (e.g. you update the game and someone tells their friend who doesn’t yet own the game).

I made the decision to go free on Sunday 20th March. A quick tweet (and a follow up reminder) in addition to a post on my touch arcade thread – the stage was set.

Rankings

Making your game Free for a period is a bit like reliving launch day in that you get to obsessively check your chart ranking in the various categories and countries. It’s great fun and, to be perfectly honest, it alone is enough reason to go free.

There are a couple of tools used pretty much universally for checking rank. The first is MajicRank which tracks rank dynamically and the second is App Annie which aggregates daily rankings.

Astro Noughts started off pretty gently, breaking into a few of the the game sub category charts…

By the end of the first day it was the #1 educational game in a number of countries and had also broken into the top overall games in the US & UK as well as the top overall Apps in a number of countries…

Things came to a head on the second day when Astro Noughts hit #14 in the top free Apps in France. It was also in the top free games in US, UK, and Canada as well as the #1 educational game in 5 countries and within the top 10 educational game in 17 countries…

Due to its high ranking in France, Astro Noughts also ranked higher than Angry Birds HD Free in the top free Apps in France for a while. Pretty cool!

I’ve tried to collate this data as best I can to show the most interesting chart rises…

Top Free Apps

Top Free Games

Top Educational Games

Downloads

Rankings are all very nice but the big question is, how many downloads does this equate to? The iPad App store requires far fewer downloads than the iPhone store in order to begin seeing changes in rank. Presumably this is due to the reach of the iPad (when compared with the iPhone) and also perhaps the way that iPad users are interacting with their devices (perhaps spending more time in the prebuilt Apps such as Safari and Mail).

During its free period (20th – 23rd March) Astro Noughts was downloaded a total of 2,299 times. I’m pretty pleased with that number. Its great knowing that such a large number of people have played my game.

I think it’s always interesting to look at country distribution, if only to highlight how important the US charts are.

Press

I didn’t contact the press during the free period and most of the positive press happened virally on twitter. However, I did get some press through App Advice (check out the humorous comment) and Appmodo.

iTunes reviews and ratings

In the past when I’ve gone free this has had a negative impact on my iTunes ratings. With Astro Noughts this hasn’t been the case and my rating is still pretty good. I suspect some of this is due to Apple’s removal of the rating popup when you delete an App.

Aftershock & Conclusion

The Astro Noughts Free experiment lasted from 20th – 23rd March. I decided to put the App back to paid on 23rd March when I could see the rankings & downloads begin to decline. Putting Astro Noughts back to paid had an immediate affect on rankings since these are not shared between free and paid apps (i.e. I went back to my previous paid rankings). However, Astro Noughts did begin to rise up the paid charts in a few places…

Since putting the App back to paid, I’ve seen a total of 4 sales (across 2 days). If we say on average that during the free promotion I had 766 downloads per day and I’m now seeing 2 downloads per day (on average), that puts my conversion rate at about 0.26%.

Here’s the resulting revenue chart for the entire life of Astro Noughts…

and the related download chart…

From that you can extrapolate fun facts such as, for Astro Noughts, each download is currently worth 0.5p.

You may look at the above as a bit of a failure. I, however, see this as a partial success. Here’s why…

• An additional 2,299 people, from around the world, have played Astro Noughts
• For a brief period, Astro Noughts was higher than Angry Birds HD Free in the Top Free Apps in France.
• I have 4 additional paid sales that I may not have otherwise had
• I got to enjoy a few days of chart craziness

As an aside, Astro Noughts v1.3 has been submitted to Apple with Game Center support and a few minor fixes. If you feel compelled, you can buy Astro Noughts for $0.99 (59p) here.

Does this match your findings? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. As for me, I’m taking my £12 and moving to France.

This past week I’ve spent time thinking about this and looking at what I’ve achieved with Bytesize Adventures, as a single person operation. When I look at my ambitions for this year and beyond, its clear to me that I’ve hit a ceiling in what I can personally achieve alone. Game development is still very much my hobby (although I’d like it to be more) and splitting my spare time between development, graphics, sound, marketing, etc means that game production is very slow.

One Eyed Cafe

I’m fortunate that I know an excellent illustrator/designer, who I’ve worked with before, who was more than willing to share in the success and failures of a new venture.

We put our collective brains together and forged an independent game studio the likes of which has never been seen before… One Eyed Cafe.

One Eyed Cafe is our joint spare-time venture. A 50/50 partnership with a shared workload where we can pool together our talents. We’ll initially be focussing on iPhone and iPad but this may well expand in the future.

We’re currently in the process of setting a few things up (branding, website and the likes) and then we’ll be moving onto brainstorming ideas for our first game.

All of our new games will be launched under the One Eyed Cafe label. If you’d like to keep up with our progress, we’ll be blogging at the One Eyed Cafe blog. It would also be great if you’d follow us on twitter @OneEyedCafe.

What does this mean for Bytesize Adventures?

I’ll continue to blog at Bytesize Adventures but mostly focussed around a few projects. I’ll still be supporting and updating Astro Noughts under my own name and I’ll still be working on my Coffee App. So my blog will consist of posts about those along with BrainWave and some of the processes we use at One Eyed Cafe.

So its not the end of this site, its just taking a different path (focussing on my individual projects and experiences). All of the really cool new games will be happening at One Eyed Cafe so be sure to keep up with that blog too.

In other news

The first free Astro Noughts update is complete and i’ll be submitting it to Apple shortly. I took the decision to cut some things from it and save them for future releases. This ultimately means that there will be more updates, more often (which is a good thing I think).

With the update complete I can now move on to my new Coffee App. I’ve spent some time this week reading up on various aspects of App design and development. I’ll hopefully be able to share some posts related to this project beginning next week. It promises to be very interesting.

There were some great speakers, with the likes of Honeyslug, Alice Taylor, Sophie Houlden, Tak Fung, Mode 7 Games, and Charlie Knight (to name a few).

Rather than cover each talk, I thought I’d just detail what I felt were some of the key points made – those that particularly resonated with me.

You need a bad cop

Something highlighted by Honeyslug which became a thread throughout the talks was the benefit of a good partnership in your game development. Often you’ll adapt the roles of good cop and bad cop, with the bad cop ensuring that the project stays on track. Interestingly, it seemed that contrary to what you might expect, this was usually the designer rather than the developer. With the developer trying to cram in more and more wacky ideas and the designer having to keep them in check.

I found this particularly relevant to me because I tend to work on all aspects of my games alone, and yet there is a clear benefit to partnering with a strong designer/artist etc.

Seek help in unlikely places

Something else that became a running theme was partnering/getting input from individuals who aren’t in the games industry. This can bring a different slant to your games and open your eyes to outside inspiration. An opportunity to express creativity in something like a game is often seen as intriguing to those who haven’t considered it before.

Know your market and where your game will be played

It’s important to recognise your target market and understand the realities of who will be exposed to your games. Apparently 24% of 10-14 year olds list playing games as their favourite activity. This is a huge, potentially untapped, market and something worth considering.

Where people are likely to play your games can also have a huge influence on it’s marketability. For instance, a Facebook game is likely to be played at work in lunch breaks, an iPhone game is likely to be played on a bus or when passing time. It’s important to understand this and build with it in mind.

Pick your battles and code clever

Not necessarily related but it was mentioned that we shouldn’t be trying to compete with larger scale games and that we should be clever about the type of games we write. An example given was using something like a car rather than a human since you can utilise physics based animation rather than having to animate by hand.

Also mentioned was mixing generative content with canned content. Rather than opting for producing individual levels (which is time consuming) or making levels entirely random, a mixed approach can ensure that levels are memorable whilst still being time efficient to code.

Analytics

I found this particularly interesting. Ensuring you are capturing data about your players and that you analyse this to improve your game. This was specifically related to online games but I think it holds true for other platforms. Correctly analysing player feedback is a great way to extend the life of your game.

Prototype lots and re-use ideas

It’s not always possible, but prototyping various ideas until you find mechanics that are fun, and developing these into fully fledged games, can pay dividends. Taking this approach you are likely to can a lot of ideas but you shouldn’t consider these ideas dead – you can always borrow from them in future games.

I met lots of great people at World of Love, saw some great demos of games, and had some awesome chats. A quick shout-out to a few of them: Luke for keeping me company and allowing me to play some awesome multiplayer flying cats, Michael for some insights into music production, Paul (and Matthew) for some generally interesting conversation and some great insights into studio life, Paul for some good conversation in the pub and because his game looks awesome, Peter and Sophie for some cool conversation about audio games, Andrew for some funny chats and the chips, and Simon for being welcoming and for the chat. Also, anyone I forgot whos twitter details I don’t have.

All in all it was a brilliant event and I highly encourage you to think about attending the next one if you are able.

I’ve read Gamasutra for longer than I can remember so having their editorial team feature one of my blogs has really made my day. I know its a little thing but, as they say, its the little things in life.

Here’s a screenshot I snagged with the feature shown bottom right…

Today also marks my return to iDevBlogADay – a great way to start the new year. I was fortunate to participate in iDevBlogADay from day 1 but gave up my slot to focus on completing Astro Noughts this year. If you’d like, you can read my previous iDevBlogADay entries here.

You’ll have to excuse me if this is slightly self-indulgent but for this post I want to review 2010 and set some goals for 2011.

First up I want to share some website statistics with you. Bytesizeadventures was setup in June 2009. I wrote a post detailing its progress at the end of 2009. 2010 has been amazing for the growth of the site. In the space of 12 months, the site has had…

21,266 visits from 14,165 unique visitors
34,510 pageviews
209 visitors in a single day (at its highest point)

The 5 most popular posts of 2010 were as follows…

• iPhone game development toolkit
• 10 don’ts of iPhone game development
• A beginners guide to iPhone game development
• my iPhone game graveyard
• the harsh reality of indie iphone game development

A huge thank you to everyone who has taken the time to visit this site in 2010. I hope you’ll continue to read in 2011.

A look back at 2010

Moving on from website statistics, here’s what I achieved (and in some cases didn’t) in 2010.

Rocket Santa bombed

Way back at the start of the year, Rocket Santa’s troubled development and rushed release resulted in the game achieving only a fraction of its potential. I wasn’t too disheartened since I only released the game in order to test the Christmas market. My conclusion is that Christmas games simply do not work. Adding Christmas content to an existing game is probably a much better option (but even then I’d be weary).

This website received a redesign

I completely redesigned Bytesize Adventures to create a design more in keeping with my iPhone development goals. This website is basically the epicentre for my game development and therefore its important to me that it feels right and represents who I am and what I’m trying to achieve.

Explorer

This represented the largest portion of my time in 2010 so its a little sad that it was pretty much a total failure. I conceptualised the game at the start of the year. This was to be my next big project, much more ambitious than anything I had done before it. The game started out as a relatively simple, single screen puzzle game but quickly became something larger, centred around exploration and random events. It took me 6 months of development to realise that things were going wrong and I eventually canned the project. You can read more about it here.

I consider this a tough lesson in scope and planning. Ideas come thick and fast throughout the development of a game and its up to you to keep them in check. This isn’t a mistake I’ll make again.

BrainWave

During the development of Explorer, I was struggling with the project management tools that were available. They’re all pretty much useless if you don’t connect with the workflow they offer. To remedy this I developed BrainWave. A simple tool to manage all of the ideas I have when developing a game and convert them into tasks to complete. BrainWave has been really successful for me, getting my projects under control and helping to drive me to ship them. The development of Astro Noughts was managed entirely through this tool. You can read more about BrainWave here and here.

Star Fusion and Rocket Santa free forever

In the latter half of the year, I was getting fed up of seeing 0 sales for Star Fusion and Rocket Santa each and every day so I decided to make them both free permanently. The result has been a handful of downloads for each of them every day. Not necessarily any better but at least I don’t have to look at zeros every day.

I still don’t know where I stand with this one. I’m still very much learning when it comes to game design and development so I want as many people as possible to play my games. On the other hand, I have ambitions to support myself by developing games for a living. Its a difficult dilemma and one that I know others share.

Astro Noughts

Thankfully 2010 ended on a high with the release of Astro Noughts for iPad. Astro Noughts has been an odd project really. Originally an iPad reworking of Star Fusion that I expected to take no more than 2 months, this quickly turned into a 6 month development and a different game entirely. It shares some common themes with Star Fusion but ultimately stands on its own (hence the new name).

It went from this…

to this…

I have a post mortem planned for Astro Noughts so I won’t talk about it too much other than to say that I’m currently struggling with marketing it correctly. I’m not ready to give up on it yet though and have some updates planned for 2011. On that note, if you have any contacts or know of any sites who you think may be interested in reviewing Astro Noughts, let me know.

Goals for 2011

With 2010 being a bit of a mixed bag, what with wasted development time and failed projects, I’m really eager to make some decent headway into being successfull in the App Store in 2011. Here are my goals for 2011…

Astro Noughts updates

As I mentioned above, despite floundering with the marketing (and target demographic) I’m not done with Astro Noughts yet. I’d like to get this game to the point where it can bring in a trickle of sales on a monthly basis. As a result, I currently have 2 free updates planned.

Update 1 will focus on bug fixes (there aren’t many) and graphical refinements, a new game mode, and a difficulty customisation system (which will no doubt also be one of my iDevBlogADay topics).

Update 2 will focus on another, more ambitious game mode and possibly Game Center integration.

New game #1

Obviously its through new games that I stand the best chance of realising my ambitions. My first new game of 2011 is currently in pre-production and is a collaboration with my favourite pixel art designer ClintonMc (who created the artwork for Rocket Santa). I can’t wait to get my teeth into this one.

New game #2

This will be another solo project for me. Currently a blank canvas.

v0.5 of BrainWave

I want to keep pushing BrainWave towards its v1.0 status. The next release will see a fair number of changes but I’ll save details of these for a future post.

A new design for this site

This is pretty much an annual thing for me. I want to create a tighter, slightly more interactive experience. I’ll mainly be focussing on structure and showcasing my games.

And thats it. 2010 in a nutshell along with my goals for 2011. My goals may not seem terribly lofty, but I can assure you that when you have a full time job to hold down, progress is slow. As always, I’d love to hear your comments below. Thanks for reading.

Each game you create is going to require different tools and it’s highly unlikely you’ll find a single piece of software to cover all of your needs. In fact, you’ll likely need multiple pieces of software to cover each of the disciplines. I’d encourage you to explore and be creative. Find tools you like, stretch them to their limits, and find alternative uses for them. Sometimes you can achieve the effect you’re looking for in really unlikely places. Its not the software that matters but the effect you can produce with it.

I’ve tried to make this list as comprehensive as possible and it therefore does include some obvious things (such as a desk) as well as some luxury items. I’ve included my reasoning behind each so I’ll leave it up to you to decide how necessary they are. I’ve split this list into sections to make it easier to refer to.

Hardware

Macbook Pro (£999): I have a 2009 aluminium model. This is absolutely indispensable, especially when paired with some of the other items of hardware on this list. You should be able to make do with any of the current mac models but I believe that a Macbook Pro is very well suited to iPhone/iPad development.

23″ Dell UltraSharp IPS monitor (£260): Another great investment. Its a bit of a luxury item and I didn’t actually get it until half way through the development of Astro Noughts. However, the extra screen real estate has been really useful for graphics work and for coding (I now tend to split the Xcode editor vertically and have my current class open in addition to something I’m referencing).

Solid Desk and comfortable chair (£250): Again, I didn’t get this until part the way through development. Its something I’ve been meaning to purchase for quite some time and it was Gavin Bowmans “Spend Money” post that finally motivated me. Its definitely a luxury since you can manage with your laptop anywhere. However, I’ve found that having a permanent setup has removed the barriers to coding since I can just sit down and start working. Its also much better for your posture than being hunched over a laptop screen.

16GB iPad (£429): I have the WiFi only model. This was a necessity for Astro Noughts since its an iPad only game. Its a great device with heaps of potential for creating innovative games. The huge touch screen is great fun to develop for.

Ricoh R8 (£130) and GorillaPod (£30): This was something that cropped up towards the end of development. You’ll need something to record game trailers. The iPad simulator seems to struggle compared to the iPhone simulator. Therefore in order to get smooth gameplay, you’ll need a way to record the device itself. I don’t recommend you purchase the Ricoh R8 – its terrible at recording video but I already owned it. The GorillaPod is a very flexible tripod that allows you to position you camera at awkward angles if required.

Wacom graphics tablet (£70): The same one I’ve owned for the past 6 years – the Wacom Graphire 3. It’s lasted me a long long time and has been a great investment. If I manage to make a little money from Astro Noughts, I’m looking to upgrade to a newer model (perhaps something a little larger too).

Wired Apple keyboard (£40) and Apple Magic Mouse (£56): If you’ve gone for an external monitor then it makes sense to also purchase an external keyboard and mouse. These are basic items but still have a place in this list.

Headphones (£55): I have the Sennheiser HD 465. If you really want to hear the quality of the sounds you are creating then you’ll need some headphones.

Software

Project Management

BrainWave (Free): If you’ve followed this blog you’ll know that I’ve created my own project management software. Its web based and in private beta (by all means feel free to sign up here). Over the next couple of months I’ll be releasing v0.5 with new features, a new name, and a new domain. This really is my “go to tool” for my game development. It has lots of areas that need to be improved but since I’m actively using it, I can guarantee this will happen. I’m very happy with it.

Code

Xcode (Free): Its produced by Apple and its free. This is pretty much your only option when developing for Apples devices. To be honest though, its excellent. Whilst it may seem daunting at first, you’ll soon be up to speed with it. Xcode 4 is on its way too and promises to be even better.

Instruments (Free): This is part of the development suite provided by Apple. I use this to check for memory leaks and allocation issues. It also has features for testing battery and cpu usage, and even an OpenGL ES overlay on the device itself.

Graphics

Paticle Designer (£5.50): This is a great piece of software at a ridiculously low price. It makes previewing and tweaking particle effects an absolute doddle. I got particle effects into my game very early on and two things I learnt quickly were that a) its easy to slow your game down with too many effects, and b) they can look tacky – so try to be a little subtle with them. Check out Markus Nigrin’s “Spice up your game” article for some inspiration.

Opacity (£65): Opacity is a vector creation application for OSX. I used it to create the HUD and UI elements in Astro Noughts. Its great for smaller vectors and has some really powerful tools.

Photoshop Elements (£60): CS5 looks great (and is the industry standard) but its also really really expensive. I’ve found that Photoshop Elements has many of the tools I need for a fraction of the price. You should investigate first, but you might be surprised to find that it caters for your needs too. All of the planets in Astro Noughts were created in Photoshop Elements as were the backgrounds.

Sound Effects & Music

The main music tracks I used in Astro Noughts were free from Incompetech and ccmixter. Whilst we’re on the subject, you can check out more resources in this post. I still ended up using several pieces of software to achieve the results I wanted for the various sound effects.

Audacity (Free): Audacity is fantastic for editing music and sound effects. I used it primarily to edit my sound effects from ThumbJam.

CFXR (Free): I love this application. I think I’ve moved past using it for all of my sound effects but its great for things like interface feedback sounds.

ThumbJam (£3.99): ThumbJam is available for iPhone and iPad. I used it to create and record the notes in the game (Each planet has its own unique note). I then passed these into Audacity for editing. There are various sound creation apps available for the iPad and iPhone and I’d encourage you not to overlook them when deciding how to create your desired effect.

Trailers

iMovie (£45 as part of the iLife suite): This software makes it easy to import your recorded video, edit it, and publish it to a service like youtube. You can view the gameplay video for Astro Noughts below (It also aptly demonstrates the negative effects of a poor video capture device – something I plan on remedying soon)

Community

WordPress (Free): My blog has been fantastic for both spreading the word about my games and keeping me motivated. This year especially, iDevBlogADay created and maintained by Miguel Á. Friginal has been a great motivator. I’m looking forward to contributing again soon.

Twitter (Free): Quite simply, essential. Get an account, get connected, and find a good group of developers. The developers I’m following on twitter keep me motivated and make me feel part of an indie games community. Having a group of like minded individuals to push you and encourage you to better yourself will make all the difference. The aforementioned iDevBlogADay is a great place to start.

As a result of the blog and twitter, Astro Noughts has already begun getting some attention. There are lots of positive effects to be gained from participating in social networks and giving back through your blog.

Miscellaneous

Coffee: I have to give a shout out to Has Bean. Great coffee and great service. You can check out my coffee post here (although I no longer use an espresso machine having switched to the excellent AeroPress). Notable bean highlights were the Brazil Fazenda Divino Espírito Santo and the Jailbreak Espresso Blend.

So there you have it. My Astro Noughts shopping list – all of the hardware and software that went into making the game. Its quite a lot, I’m sure you’ll agree. After all is said and done though – you can produce a game with a fairly low spec computer and some free software. Don’t let resources be the barrier that stops you from diving in and having a go.

Plenty of creative outlets accommodate this. Books do. We all know who shakespeare is right? Films do. Kubrick is well know and his films have had an impact. Even TV. Honestly I bet they’re still playing re-runs of Friends long after you and I are no longer around.

Narrowing the field a bit, what about games? Have any games left a significant legacy? Board games have – Chess is as relevant today as it was centuries ago. What about video games? Sure they’re relatively new but we have a few that have a legacy, albeit one with slightly less impact – pong for instance.

What about the digital space? I mean downloadable games. Any stand out for you? Any that you think will leave a lasting legacy? Nothing springs to my mind (I can tell you that it isn’t Angry Birds or even Doodle Jump). More importantly, how will these games be consumed in future? These downloadable games by their very nature are throwaway. They exist on platforms that will soon become defunct. How will they be passed down? Whos responsibility is it? Apple, Microsoft, Sony, etc have the master copies of these potential legacies. How long will they keep them and at what point will they decide that they are no longer relevant?

Are downloadable games even capable of creating a lasting legacy? Surely someone will create a work that transcends its creative shackles and speaks to a wider audience across generations. I’d like to think that I could create such a thing. A game that gets people thinking. Something that has an impact. I haven’t considered it before but shouldn’t we strive to create something that leaves a lasting impression? something other than crappy clones of existing games with forgettable game mechanics (Of course I include my own games in that sentiment).

One day, someone will look back at what you did. They’ll look at your games (if they can find a way to access them) and say “something”. What will they say?…