Noel

Independent game designer and programmer. Created Subterfuge, Casey's Contraptions, Flower Garden. Runner. Cyclist. Nature enthusiast. Magic addict. @noel_llopis.

Dr. Seuss Lorax Garden Up The Charts

If you follow this blog regularly you’ve probably noticed that there’s been a kind of blackout period. I hardly posted during the last couple of months. What happened? Lorax Garden is what happened.

In late February I agreed to collaborate with Oceanhouse Media on a game project. They had the Dr. Seuss license and I had the flowers. Perfect match for a Lorax-themed game! And so the Lorax Garden was born.

I was originally hoping to write some entries here on the progress of the game as I worked on it, but I quickly realized that I wouldn’t have any spare time for anything other than the project. We wanted to have the Lorax Garden (and the Lorax book app) on the App Store by Earth Day (April 20th), so that left us with a very aggressive 5-week schedule (and GDC somewhere in the middle!). Fortunately, we managed to hit our deadline, and you can see the results today by yourself by downloading it from the App Store.

It was very interesting starting a totally new project from the existing Flower Garden codebase. I had to add some new flower-tech to make flowers more Seussian (curvy, uneven) and make Truffula Trees. Lorax Garden has a definite game structure and progression, so all the game code was completely new. It even has a flower-growing minigame to earn extra care hearts. All that had to be created by ripping out Flower Garden code and writing new one. It was a pleasure to see how easy it was to reuse all the flower-tech code that was well isolated and tested from the beginning though.

The Lorax Garden is currently featured by Apple on the App Store, and it’s on sale for $0.99 (down from the regular price of $2.99). All of that combined with a strong launch and mentions on USA Today and other media outlets have brought it up to the #39 (edit: #37!) paid app overall in the US App Store charts. A fantastic result, and with any luck it will continue climbing for another day or two.

OpenGL And UIKit Demo

This coming Monday I’ll be giving a presentation at 360iDev titled “All You Wanted To Know About Mixing OpenGL with UIKit (And More)”. It’s an extended version of my talk at this year’s GDC iPhone Summit. It’s going to be 1h 20min long instead of just half an hour.

The main difference is that I’m going to go in detail about each of the different cases of mixing OpenGL and UIKit, and what better way to do that than with a live demo. I’ll be switching back and forth between Keynote and XCode and going over the details, which is where a lot of the tricky parts are.

Here is the source code for the demo. That way you can look at it now and come to the session prepared with more questions, or ready to discuss what works and what doesn’t work for you. I love to have interactive sessions, so definitely come ready to ask questions.

If you’re not coming to 360iDev… shame on you! It’s the best iPhone conference around. You’ll be missing not just my session, but tons of other great talks, and the iPhone Game Jam (sponsored by TouchArcade this year). If you can’t make it this time, make a note on your calendar for next time!

Demo source code. Released under the MIT license.

GDC 2010: The Best of Both Worlds: Using UIKit with OpenGL

Here are the slides for my session at the GDC iPhone Summit, The Best of Both Worlds: Using UIKit With OpenGL.

It was a 30-minute slot, so the material is pretty condensed without the chance to expand on the topics. I’m giving an extended version of this talk at 360iDev in a few weeks, so I’ll be able to get into more details then and have a cool sample app that shows off all those concepts.

It was great seeing a bunch of you at my session and at around the iPhone and Indie Summits. It was a great couple of days!

GDC Time!

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 on Tuesday and Wednesday. It’s great to see the iPhone getting that much recognition as a gaming platform. Definitely way more than last year’s presence at the conference. Both days are going to be packed with awesome sessions, and I will be giving a presentation on mixing OpenGL and UIKit on Tuesday at 11:15am. I’ll definitely be around throughout all the summit (except when I sneak out for a few minutes over to the Indie Summit which unfortunately happens at the same time).

The rest of the conference looks amazing as usual. There are always way more talks that I want to see than I can actually attend. In particular, I’m really looking forward to a lot of the design talks because they’re very inspiring and directly applicable to any kind of game development. Also, rumor has it I might be making a quick guest appearance in a certain session on Saturday.

Finally, if you’re an iPhone developer, make sure to come to the IDU party on Wednesday evening, and meet us for drinks on Thursday evening after the IGF ceremony.

I’ll be running around with a busy schedule, but you can always follow my Twitter updates to know where I’m at every moment. I look forward to seeing everybody again this year!

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 nomination means quite a bit for me. Flower Garden has gotten some great reviews, and some incredible user feedback, and it was even featured as an Apple Staff Favorite on the App Store, but it had never been up for an award of this importance.

It’s also the category that it was nominated for. It makes me really proud that it was nominated for Most Innovative Game, because one of my original goals was to create something unique and original.

Finally, these awards are particularly meaningful because they’re not based on popularity, sales, or voting, which are bound to bias awards towards best-selling titles. Instead, these finalists were hand-picked by the editors of Pocket Gamer. With the crazy amount of good apps out there, it really is an honor that they selected Flower Garden as one of the top 5 for 2009.

Thank you, Pocket Gamer!