Bytesize Adventures

I first heard about Composition No. 1 through another book, Twisty Little Passages, which examines the history and impact of Interactive Fiction (Including the humble text adventure).

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. keep reading…

By Chris | Posted in: iDevBlogADay, Tangents | Tags: book, Design, iDevBlogADay, inspiration, interactive fiction, text adventure
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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
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Lets face it, the previous design for Bytesize Adventures was pretty ugly. More than that, whilst it served its purpose, it lacked direction and cohesion.

As we entered 2010, and with a third iPhone game in development, I decided it was time to do something about the site. What you’re browsing now is my redesign for 2010. What do you think?

I love web design and development and with this latest design I took the opportunity to focus on the details and components that make up the site. Here’s a brief look at some of the key decisions I made for the new design. keep reading…

By Chris | Posted in: Tangents | Tags: colours, Design, typography, web design, website
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I’ve just begun work on my second iPhone game. This time around I would like to share more about the processes i’m using. These are by no means industry standards, they just represent my personal workflow.

The first step for me is the idea. I don’t have a specific method for this, I get inspiration from things I see around me. I probably come up with around 5 ideas before settling on one that I like. The idea for this particular game came about because I was inspired by an image I saw. keep reading…

By Chris | Posted in: Development Diary | Tags: Design, inspiration, moleskine, moodboard
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