Unfortunately I’ve been ill for most of this week so I haven’t been able to spend any time working on my game. I think this highlights the difficulties of working as an independent games developer – it doesn’t take much to disrupt your work and it can have a severe impact on your development schedule. I’m lucky in that I also have a full time job so I don’t have the financial pressures associated with developing independently. I wonder how other devs cope with this.

Here’s an image of the game editor in its current early form. I’m not going to go into detail about it now, i’ll leave that for a future post once its more developed.

I’m still looking for inspiration for the visual style of my game. I have some basic elements in and am playing with a few ideas but i’d like to come up with a strong, individual style.

I’ve also been thinking more about my first iPad game and I think i’m going to start sketching some concept UI’s for it. I want to hold off on actual development until I have actually played with the device (as detailed here).

Since I don’t have much to update you on this week, I thought i’d take the opportunity to share some of the books that are currently inspiring me…

The Art of Tim Burton

I have a real love of coffee table books – huge visual tomes that inspire you (whilst you enjoy a cup of your favorite java). The Art of Tim Burton is a unique insight into the mind of one of our greatest directors and acts as brilliant inspiration.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Ok so I admit that this was very much driven by my love of the worlds created by Tim Burton and the fact that his re-imagining of Alice in Wonderland is released in a matter of weeks.

This is the same novel originally penned by Lewis Carroll but brought to life by new illustrations from Camille Rose Garcia. Its not just the illustrations that are new, the typography is exemplary and a lot of thought has gone into the layout of the text. A truly lovely book to behold.

The Lego Book

Who doesn’t enjoy lego? This books explores the highly enjoyable story of Lego’s inception as well as a look at some of the more unique sets over the past 60 years or so. The art of creating something which encourages creativity , and makes the process fun, is something that i’d love to emulate in my game. There’s a lot to be learnt from the Lego way of doing things.

And that’s it for this week’s update. Next week i’ll hopefully have some more progress on the game to share with you. See you then.