Bytesize Adventures

Today is officially the first day of 2011, so Happy New Year!

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. keep reading…

By Chris | Posted in: Development Diary, Tangents | Tags: 2010, 2011, astro noughts, iDevBlogADay, new year
7 Comments »

I’m eschewing the pursuit of useful information this week to instead bring you this frivolous post on coffee… enjoy.

Coffee, like cooking and baking, seems to be synonymous with being a game developer (Why do game developers like cooking and baking so much?). I’m sure some game devs out there don’t actually enjoy coffee (purely for the purpose of disproving my theory). So, for those of you that fall into that camp… sorry. Keep enjoying your tea, water, or whatever (maybe someone can write a herbal tea guide). For the rest of you, here’s my guide to coffee for game devs.

Coffee is very much a personal thing and you should create a process that works for you and produces coffee that you like. This is my process. keep reading…

By Chris | Posted in: Tangents | Tags: americano, coffee, espresso, iDevBlogADay
9 Comments »

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’ve been toying with the idea of a new version of Star Fusion for quite some time. It was the first iPhone game I created (over a year ago) and, despite its simplicity, I still really like it (A slightly biased opinion I know). I always felt that its core mechanics were solid but that it didn’t quite hit the rights notes with its overall polish and depth. keep reading…

By Chris | Posted in: Development Diary, News | Tags: iDevBlogADay, iPad, Star Fusion, star fusion hd
1 Comment »

To date I’ve designed, developed, and published a couple of iPhone games and am currently knee deep in a third, and as of this weekend a fourth. Whilst I don’t yet feel that I have enough experience to advise you on what to do to ensure success, I can turn it on it’s head and tell you my top 10 don’ts of iPhone game development. Here they are… keep reading…

By Chris | Posted in: Tangents | Tags: iDevBlogADay, tips
13 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 »