Bytesize Adventures

6 months, 5,000 lines of code, 13 blog posts, 15,000 words and both the App and my blog series are finally finished. When I started this I planned on following a carefully designed and documented process to translate my App store idea into an actual product. Along the way my aim was to share all of the steps with you, along with the results.

This post intends to wrap-up the series. It also contains the final blog post, my Coffee Cellar postmortem. Whereas the postmortem covers the App itself, this post reviews the process and acts as a convenient hub to bring together all of the previous posts in the series (for future reference). keep reading…

By Chris | Posted in: App Development, Design, Development Diary, iDevBlogADay | Tags: app design, app development, artwork, coffee cellar, development, distribution, ideas, iDevBlogADay, marketing, postmortem, project management, sales, testing, wireframes, workflow
8 Comments »

I find it incredibly difficult to settle on the “right” project management tool for my independent development – I’m forever changing my mind and can’t seem to settle on one for very long. You may already know that I’m in the process of building my own PM tool but the problem I have is that I don’t have enough time to progress it as fast I’d like. Until I have a little more time, I need a stopgap solution (flying in the face of the “Eat your own dog food” school of thought).

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.

By Chris | Posted in: App Development, Development Diary, Tangents | Tags: project management
3 Comments »

About 5 months ago I spent a weekend creating a project management tool (named BrainWave) for my game development. I received positive feedback and a few developers were interested in trying it out so I launched a private beta. During the last 5 months I’ve had a steady trickle of invite requests. I’ve also continued to develop BrainWave. keep reading…

By Chris | Posted in: Development Diary, Tangents | Tags: brainwave, ideas, project management
No 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 »

Project Management – It’s perhaps the least sexy part of independent game design and development. If you’re anything like me, you’ll have struggled endlessly with existing products trying to cram your “unique” workflow into their stubborn interfaces, only to not even bother opening it again after a handful of attempts.

I’ve often resigned myself to the fact that project management tools just don’t suit my style of game development. It is true afterall that developing games for the iPhone involves a much shorter time frame – rapid development and multiple iterations are key (at least for me). Still, without these tools I find myself floundering. Where do i write my new ideas? How do I track my progress? What are my next steps? keep reading…

By Chris | Posted in: Development Diary, Tangents | Tags: basecamp, brainwave, gtd, ideas, omniplan, pivotal tracker, process, project management, the hit list, things, todo, trac, workflow
14 Comments »

This week has mainly been about the game’s theme and artwork style. The blocks you saw in last weeks post were only intended to be placeholders and it had gotten to the point in the project where they were becoming difficult to overlook. I struggled with the theme for some time, even contemplating not really having one – creating something terribly abstract. Eventually I drew inspiration from the key gameplay element, exploration. With this also came the working title for the game: “Explorer”.

With a theme selected, the artwork was, and still is, a challenge. I want the game to have a strong visual identity so i’m aiming for anything but realism. What I currently have will alter considerably before the game launches – this is just a first pass.

I also introduced a new element to enhance the exploration theme, fog. I hope this will serve its purpose to enhance the feeling of exploration and indeed to drive it. It’s still very much in a prototype form (hence the visual artefacts).

Next steps are work on the customisation and level editor. I’ll then build off all of these elements as I flesh out the game.

In other news, i’m finally fed up with the current project management tools on offer. Its not that they’re not very good – they are. They just don’t seem to fit with my style of working. I find myself forcing my workflow into the tools and inevitably they end up just getting in the way.

To that end i’ve decided to take a weekend out of game programming to write my own project management tool for game design and development. I intend for it to very simple and driven by the way I work. Perhaps calling it a project management tool is a bit of a stretch – its more of an idea management tool… but thats how I design and develop my iPhone games. I’ll write a blog post detailing the tool once its complete at the end of this weekend.

Until next time…

By Chris | Posted in: Development Diary, Weekly Update | Tags: explorer, project management, prototype, screenshots
2 Comments »

It occurred to me the other day that i don’t really have any sort of project plan for my Game. Sure I have some ideas scribbled on pieces of paper scattered around my apartment but nothing more concrete than that. What i’d really like is a tool or suite of tools for recording my ideas and planning the remaining tasks.

To that end i started to research some available options on the internet. One of the first leads i stumbled across was this article which refers to an issue tracking system called Trac. I played around with this a little but ultimately felt that it was too heavy for my project and didn’t offer me the speed or flexibility i needed for prototyping my ideas. keep reading…

By Chris | Posted in: Tangents | Tags: fossil, ganttproject, ideas, merlin, omnioutliner, process, project management, story, trac
2 Comments »