It’s that time of the year when all the games industry converges on San Francisco. Even though this is my 12th GDC (in a row, no less), and the conference has grown and matured a lot, it still feels as exciting as the first one. This year will GDC will host the first ever iPhone Summit [...]
Flower Garden a Finalist for The 2010 Pocket Gamer Awards for Most Innovative Game!
Pocket Gamer just announced the finalists for the 2010 Pocket Gamer Awards. I was thrilled to see that Flower Garden has been selected as a finalist for the Most Innovative iPhone Game award. On a personal level, this n[...]
Figuring Out The iPad
Everybody was buzzing with excitement yesterday morning. A flurry of Twitter comments scrolled by all throughout the morning and the afternoon. You could taste the iPad in the air (OK, almost). Shortly after the unveilin[...]
Buy Flower Garden This Wednesday To Help Haiti
As part of Indie+Relief, all proceeds from Flower Garden this Wednesday will be donated to Haiti through Doctors Without Borders. Encourage your friends to buy Flower Garden for a good cause! That includes in-app purchas[...]
Making A Living (Barely) On The iPhone App Store (aka The Numbers Post)
The App Store is a very hit-driven environment. A few apps sell a large amount of units, and the great majority sell next to nothing. That’s somewhat similar to the music industry, except that the audience for music is[...]
Featured Posts
All About In-App Purchases Part 2: Selling The Goods
The last entry about in-app purchases left off with the products correctly displayed on the store and ready for purchase. Let’s push that buy button! Purchasing a product The store is fully populated, the items are displayed and, if all goes well, the user presses the buy button. What now? At this point I check that in-app purchases [...]
All About In-App Purchases Part 1: Displaying Store Items
Ever since Apple announced OS 3.0 with in-app purchases, I knew I had implement it in Flower Garden. The concept of in-app purchases fits very well with the idea of a flower shop where virtual gardeners can purchase extra items for their gardens. It was just a matter of justifying the time necessary to implement [...]
Data-Oriented Design (Or Why You Might Be Shooting Yourself in The Foot With OOP)
Picture this: Toward the end of the development cycle, your game crawls, but you don’t see any obvious hotspots in the profiler. The culprit? Random memory access patterns and constant cache misses. In an attempt to improve performance, you try to parallelize parts of the code, but it takes heroic efforts, and, in the end, [...]


