When we started work on Lasting Legacy, I envisioned it as a quick 9-10 month project (that’s quick for me, but I know it’s long for other devs). As we worked on it, it felt like the game was interesting and rich enough to spend a little longer and flesh it out to its full potential. Maybe spend a total of a year and a half on it.

Now it’s been two full years since we started. We’ve had a playable game almost from the start, but when I have an honest look at it, it’s still far from launch. We still need lots more content, game balancing, polishing, different game modes, porting to different platforms, creating videos, and all the marketing. It’s that pesky last 20% that takes 80% of the time–OK, maybe not 80% but at least another 12 months. All of that is definitely doable, but it would bring the project to a full 3 years (at least!), or a total of 6 man-years.

The problem with that is that, for Lasting Legacy to be financially successful, it would have to sell a lot of copies. A lot more than I can realistic expect it to sell. Let’s reeeeeally stretch the meaning of “successful” and say that the goal is that we should each make $50K per year. That’s a total of $300K after the cut from the stores, or about $430K in sales. At $15 per sale, that’s almost 30K sales, and most Steam games don’t come even close to that number.

So we had a choice: We could focus really hard on the marketing aspect to make sure we hit that many sales, or we could stop development altogether, cut our loses, and move on to something else. The problem with focusing on marketing is that it would add even more time, making it necessary to sell even more copies to break even. It would also mean spending months doing work that I really dislike (making trailers, doing a Kickstarter, promoting the game, chasing reviewers and streamers…).

Would it be worth doing that marketing push? Was I really willing to bet that Lasting Legacy would be a big seller? If I’m honest, I think that Lasting Legacy has the potential to be a very good, original game, but I don’t think it’s a game that lots of people want (or if they do, I wasn’t able to connect with that audience). I’m fine making games that don’t sell very much, but at least I want to enjoy the work that I’m doing. So in the end, I’d rather stop working on Lasting Legacy and move on to other projects that I can enjoy and can be potentially more profitable.

Fortunately the time I spent on Lasting Legacy wasn’t completely wasted: Apart from developing some new tech that I didn’t have when I started (SQLite to organize data, or on-the-fly font rendering for example), I continued to grow as a designer, and I hope a lot of what I learned will carry over to my future projects.

Some people will take away from this that Lasting Legacy failed because we didn’t do market research to see if there was demand for it, or tailor it to the tastes of gamers. I disagree. My goal from the start was not to maximize profits, it was to make a game I found interesting and getting compensated for my time. The failure of Lasting Legacy was that we were just too slow. If we had managed to make the game in a year like we originally planned, just selling 5-6K units would have been enough to cover our time.

So what’s next for me? I’ve taken the lessons learned to heart and decided to make a game by myself in 6 months. That’s a hard deadline. I’m drawing inspiration from Michael Brough and Arnold Rauers, both of them excellent game designers who make small games that start with major artificial constraints and they design around them. The constraint I picked is to make a simulation game in a very small grid (single screen, around 6x6). So far I’ve been doing some prototypes and I’m pretty happy how it’s coming along. If all goes well I’ll announce it soon and release it in a few months.

As part of this shift towards making smaller games, I’m going to create a mailing list for my games in general, not for each game individually. If you’d like to keep up to date, please sign up for my mailing list and I’ll make sure you’re the first ones to know about my upcoming games.

Subscribe to my mailing list

Wish me luck!

You can read more about Lasting Legacy in the official web site. There isn’t a lot of information yet, but we wanted to announce it now so we can talk openly about it until release. We’ll definitely be revealing more information here over the upcoming weeks.

Platforms

The first thing that might surprise some people is that we’re going to release Lasting Legacy for Windows and Mac first (hopefully through Steam). This is a departure from all of my games as an independent developer, but I feel that PC is a better fit than mobile for Lasting Legacy. Also, I know Steam is flooded with new game releases, but it’s not quite the mad house that mobile is these days, especially for a game that follows the old “pay-once play-forever” approach.

It won’t be difficult to make a tablet/phone version later, so assuming it’s moderately successful, we’re likely to make an iOS version afterwards (Android is such a horrible development environment for native C games, that it probably won’t be worth our time). And I suppose there’s always the possibility of a console version if the opportunity presents itself.

Goals

Why are we making Lasting Legacy? There are several high-level goals I had for my next project.

1. Shorter development. When I look back at the development times of the games I released over the years, I see a disturbing trend.

   

   I really didn’t want my next project to take nearly as long as Subterfuge did. Part of it meant tackling a game with a smaller scope, and part of it meant making it single player. My hope is that Lasting Legacy takes us less than 18 months from start to launch. Let’s see if we can make it.

2. Potential for wide appeal. The nature of Subterfuge meant that it was always a very niche product. We went into it knowing that and we successfully created a game that a very small percentage of people really love. This time I wanted to change things and wanted to create a game that had potential for wide appeal. It doesn’t mean that it’s going to be a clone of existing games or that we’re going to dumb down anything. It just means that more people might like it, and some will hopefully love it as much as the devoted Subterfuge fans.

   So far, in the extremely tiny, non-statistically meaningful sample of our close families, my wife, who is definitely not a video gamer, really likes the idea of the game and is interested to hear more about it (which is more than I can say for any of my projects since Flower Garden).

3. Low money investment. Maybe it’s not quite the Indipocalypse but there’s no doubt it’s a lot harder to make money from selling independent, original games than it was 5 years ago. Because of that, I don’t feel comfortable investing a large amount of money into a project that might or might not end up being financially successful. That means picking a game that we can do almost completely between the two of us, minimizing the amount of contracting we have to do, and the scope of Lasting Legacy is perfect for that.

Roadmap

We still have a lot of work to do ahead of us.

• Steam Greenlight. Once we have a lot more content in the game, we’ll be able to create a video for the game and get it on Steam through the Greenlight process.
• Early access. Once we’re on Steam, we’ll have a period of Early Access. Because the Lasting Legacy is highly replayable, it’s going to be a good candidate for Early Access. That time is also really going to help us fine tune the balance of the game and take player feedback into account for the final release.
• Release. When will this be? Once the game is done (but it better be this year!!).

Want to help us make Lasting Legacy a success? Make sure you sign up for the mailing list and/or join the Facebook page. Apart from progress updates, we’ll announce when the game is on Greenlight so you can help vote us through it. Once we hit Early Access, we’d love it if you can play the game and send us your feedback.

Yikes! It was over a year ago! That’s probably the longest gap ever in the history of this blog. What happened? And most importantly for the two of you still reading, what’s going to happen over here?

Subterfuge happened mostly. It was a long project that ran much longer than we expected. This last year I was focused on getting Subterfuge out the door. The little bit of writing energy I had went into writing for the Subterfuge development blog.

For those of you who missed it, here are some of the highlights of the stuff I wrote focused on game design. Also check it all out because Ron wrote a bunch of good stuff as well:

• A Board Game At Heart. Where I explain how Subterfuge is more like a board game without any of the physical manifestations of a physical board game.

• Luck in Subterfuge. Applying one of my favorite topics to Subterfuge.

• Balancing Different Paths to Victory. Balancing a competitive, multiplayer game was tricky and new for me. Lots of lessons learned.

• Emergent Depth. Why simplicity and depth are not mutually exclusive.

• Depth-First Design. More on how we first designed Subterfuge for depth.

• Gaming the Game. The pains of a multiplayer, competitive game. And that was even before launch!

• Cycling and Subterfuge. One of the least popular posts, but one of my favorites, highlighting how Subterfuge and road cycling have several similar dynamics.

OK, so I was busy. You get it. What’s going to happen over here in the future? To be honest, it wasn’t an easy decision.

I considered stopping writing new entries in the blog and just leaving it up as an archive. Interesting game design conversations happen over at Twitter fairly frequently and so I have a reduced impulse to write here. Unfortunately those conversations are a) hard to follow b) quickly lost. So if what I write gets split up in a bunch of small tweets, it would be an overall loss.

At the other extreme, I considered getting back on a regular schedule and writing one article every week while back in the days of #idevblogaday. It’s tempting, but I didn’t like the pressure to have something written by a particular day. Nor did I like to feel that I had to come up with a significant, polished article.

So instead I’ll take a middle road: I’ll write relatively short posts in a relatively frequent schedule. How’s that for vague? :-)

As for the content of the posts, it will all be centered around game design (probably not much pure programming anymore) and hopefully cover all the phases of my next project. I’m also curious about possibly doing some streaming, but I have to find some content that fits well with that medium.

If you have some topics you’d like me to cover, make sure to let me know on the comments or on Twitter.

Happy 2016 everybody!

2010 was the year I was hoping to ship Casey’s Contraptions, but that didn’t happen. However, it’s great to see Pocket Gamer took notice of the ongoing work on Flower Garden. Every update feels like a small product release on its own, and there were many updates in 2010!

Flower Garden has come a long way since its initial release on April 2009 (almost two years ago!). There is so much more to the game now than the initial release! These are just some of the most important new features since then:

• Multiple seed packs
• Multiple garden locations
• Day/night cycles
• Fertilizer
• Green Thumb Point awards
• Game Center achievements and leaderboards
• Sending bouquets through Facebook (and SMS in this next update)

Flower Garden also recently reached the milestone of 5 million bouquets sent. That’s a lot of flowers! Thanks to all the Flower Garden fans for making this possible!

Fast-forward another year, and this morning I woke up to a very pleasant and unexpected surprise: Flower Garden was featured on the App Store under Apps For Valentine’s Day!

Flower Garden is still going strong, but I wasn’t expecting that at all. Thank you, Apple! Not only that, but this feature also appears on the device App Store. Flower Garden was featured twice before by Apple, but never before on a spot that appeared on the device. So that’s a first for Flower Garden!

To make things more interesting, I had been planning on doing a bit of promotion around Valentine’s Day like last year. So a few days ago I released a new update, and included another in-app purchase for the most asked-for feature: More pots in another garden space.

Finally, to round things off, I planned on doing a similar promotion to what I did last year around Mother’s Day, and I set Flower Garden to be free from today until Valentine’s Day to encourage even more people to try it. To get the word out of the price drop, I got some promotion going from Pocket Frogs and a few other apps encouraging users try out the now free Flower Garden. I’m also hoping a few media outlets cover the sale to get the word out as much as possible.

As of this moment, Flower Garden is in the top 100 apps in the US and in the top 50 games, so the combination of everything seems to be working. We’ll see how things develop over this coming week. Until then, it’s going to be an exciting ride.

For the latest news on Flower Garden, join the Facebook page by clicking “Like”:

This is a bit of a different project than some of my past ones. This one is a collaboration with Miguel Ángel Friginal from Mystery Coconut. I’m doing the programming, Miguel is doing all the art, and we’re both contributing equally to the design and everything else. It has been great having some awesome art to go with the game, but also to collaborate with someone really closely on the game.

Casey’s Contraptions was one of those ideas for a game that I kept wanting to make for quite a while, and now it was finally the right time. It meets the three main requirements that I’m looking for in a game project:

• Something original
• Has potential to sell well
• It involves a creative activity (instead of something violent or destructive)

The idea of games based on mechanical contraptions is not new, but there are surprisingly few games based on it. We are hoping to bring a lot new to the table: Casey himself, unlockable items, interface built from the ground up for multi touch, modern physics simulation, social features, sharing of solutions, and even creation and sharing of new levels. We are really excited to be working on this project and we can’t wait until it’s released.

Development

Casey’s Contraptions started as a prototype back in the summer. After a day or two messing with physics engines and creating some objects, I knew there was something there, so I spent a two more weeks creating an initial version. It wasn’t much more than a tech proof-of-concept, but it was clear that there was a game there (even with my horrible stand-in clip art assets).

I sent that built to a couple of friends for initial feedback. It was laughably early, but that’s the time when it’s possible to really make radical changes to the design. I knew the people I was sending it to a) were used to seeing games at early stages, and b) were not afraid to tell me if something sucked. Actually, I told them to skip the nice parts and just focus on everything that they didn’t like. Not surprisingly, that initial feedback was crucial, and really shaped how Casey’s Contraptions evolved since then.

Shortly after that, Miguel joined me full time on the game and we dove right into it. For our development, we used a super light-weight agile approach: We have high-level “user stories”, and two week iterations. Iterations are somewhat flexible (plus minus a few days) and we don’t strictly estimate the tasks, just take on as many user stories as we think we can do in that time. The important parts are to always be focused on the most important stories, and to take them to completion each time.

Miguel lives in Seattle and I’m in Carlsbad, so we do all of our work remotely. We use Subversion hosted remotely, and we’re in constant communication through iChat and email. That allows us to iterate on a piece of art, an item behavior, or a menu item multiple times very quickly. It’s not as good as sitting side by side, but I haven’t felt like working remotely has gotten in the way at all.

After a busy month and a half, we got to where you see it today, and we submitted the game to the Independent Games Festival (IGF).

Independent Games Festival

Some people have asked me why I wanted to submit it to the IGF. I have to be honest and admit that I had never really considered not submitting it.

I imagine everybody reading this blog knows about the IGF already. It’s the closest thing to the Movie Academy Awards that we have for independent games. There are many reasons why you’d want to submit your game. The amount of press and prestige associated with winning or even being nominated as a finalist is huge. The prize money is a nice touch, but it’s not really enough to make much of a difference in the game itself (I’m talking about the Mobile Category prize). Of course, there are many other fantastic games that are competing at the IGF (a total of almost 400 games!), so it’s hard to count on becoming a finalist.

One very real and concrete reason to enter the IGF was to have a very well-defined milestone. It wasn’t that different from one of our iterations, except that we had a real customer (the IGF judges) and a non-flexible deadline. That made us really focus our efforts and put in some extra effort in the last couple of weeks to get it in shape for the IGF. Looking back at the game just a couple of weeks ago, it’s amazing how far it came in that time.

For me personally, the biggest reason to enter the IGF is because it’s something I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve followed the IGF since the first one in 1999 (which was, coincidentally, the first GDC I attended). Every time I walked through the booths or watched the award ceremony, I wanted to be part of it. So finally, this was my chance to do it. It was a great experience going through the process. Now the next life goal will be to actually make it as a finalist.

Submitting Casey’s Contraptions had another, unexpected side effect: It tipped our hand and forced us to announce the game sooner than we were planning on doing. It wasn’t until a few days before the submission that we realized the list of IGF games would go public right away. Originally we were planning on announcing the game at 360iDev in mid November, but this forced us to move the schedule up somewhat. Hopefully that will be a good thing and will allow us to build some good buzz in the upcoming months all the way until the release. Keep an eye out for a gameplay video and some hands-on previews in the next few weeks.

If you want to keep up to date with Casey’s Contraptions development, join the Facebook group, follow Miguel and me on Twitter, or keep an eye on the Touch Arcade thread.

This post is part of iDevBlogADay, a group of indie iPhone development blogs featuring two posts per day. You can keep up with iDevBlogADay through the web site, RSS feed, or Twitter.

And if you haven’t picked up your free copy of Flower Garden, make sure to do it now. It will probably go back to full price after this weekend.

Gracias! Obrigado! Grazie! Σας ευχαριστώ! Tak!

If you’ve already purchased Flower Garden and you’d still like to help out, you can check out the great lineup of Mac and iPhone apps at Indie+Relief, or donate directly to Doctors Without Borders here.

This is the first time Flower Garden has received any kind of “Apple love”, so it’s particularly exciting, especially considering that Flower Garden was released all the way back in April. I imagine the recent update, which included the Flower Shop with in-app purchases, must have caught someone’s eye.

The only downside is that the featuring might throw off the sales data I was collecting to show the effect on sales that in-app purchases and the holiday season had. But I’m not really complaining. That’s a very nice reason to have the data thrown off :-) Thank you Apple!

The class is aimed at iPhone developers without previous OpenGL or 3D graphics experience. As part of the class, we’ll create both 2D and 3D OpenGL applications, and we’ll cover a broad range of topics, start with the basics of setting up OpenGL and rendering triangles on screen, to multitexturing and point sprites in the last day. This is definitely a hands-on class, so you’ll need to bring your laptop and be ready to do some coding.

Check out the Mobile Orchard page for discounts and registration details. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Hope to see you there!

Obviously I’m biased when I say the class is going to be awesome (which it is), but I can also say with total honesty that 360iDev is an incredible conference. It’s very different from WWDC, but that’s what makes it so great: It has top-quality content and speakers, but it’s small and intimate, so you get to meet and hang out with all the other speakers and participants. It was at the first 360iDev conference back in March that I met Keith and Owen (among many other cool developers) in person for the first time and that’s how App Treasures was born.

So if you’re on the fence, I hope you give it a try. See you in Denver!

The class is aimed at iPhone developers without previous OpenGL experience. It’s going to be very hands-on, and you’ll create both 2D and 3D applications during the weekend. You’ll learn all the basics: cameras, transforms, and how to draw meshes, but we’ll also cover some more advanced topics such as lighting, multitexturing, point sprites, and even render targets. Most importantly, you’ll walk away with a solid understanding of the basis, which will allow you to continue learning OpenGL and advanced computer graphics on your own from the docs, samples, or even browsing the API directly.

The main requirement for the class is that you’re familiar with the iPhone development environment and that you have basic knowledge of the C language. Beyond that, to the the most out of the course, you should be familiar with the basics of linear algebra (vector, matrices, and dot products). Anything else, we’ll cover it all during the class.

Registration is now open, and you can get some great discounts by registering early and attending the 360iDev conference. For more details, check the official announcement page.

Hope to see some of you there!

Notice the other iPhone games that flash at the start of the Flower Garden section: Harbor Master, Up There, and Little Red Sled, all App Treasures games! The video also starts with coverage of Fifa 10, so we’re in pretty good company :-)

Today we finally unveiled a project we had been working on for a couple of months: The App Treasures label.

Only indie games that we consider to be really fun, polished, and of high quality are part of the label. We hope that when players enjoy one of our games, they can turn to the other App Treasures games and find something they like.

With the App Store dominated more every day by big developers and publishers, this is a way for small indie developers to stand our ground. With App Treasures we establish a strong brand, share resources, and get more visibility in the App Store and in the eyes of the users. The same benefits we would get with a publisher, but without giving up our independence, creative freedom, or a percentage of the profits.

The current App Treasures members are:

• The Blimp Pilots (Koi Pond, Distant Shore)
• Imangi Studios (Imangi, Word Squares, Little Red Sled)
• Snappy Touch (Flower Garden)
• Streaming Colour Studios (Dapple)
• Veiled Games (Up There, Payday Roulette)

You can read more details in this interview I did for App Craver. Mobile Orchard also published a really good piece with some interesting views and conclusions on App Treasures.

Oh, and don’t forget to follow App Treasures on Twitter to keep up with the latest news.

When: April Wednesday 22nd at 7:30PM until whenever Where: O’Sullivan’s Pub in Carlsbad (home of the Appy Entertainment Secret World Headquarters)

Appy is being a great host again and providing some munchies. You’re responsible for your own drinks though :-)

Hope to see you there!

The interview topics range from high-level topics like business aspects of iPhone development, down to the nitty-gritty of how the procedural flowers were created, or how I had to use assembly language to take advantage of the vector floating point processor on the iPhone to do all the heavy lifting for matrix transforms.

Flower Garden was finally approved and it’s available right now! This is what I’ve been pouring my heart and soul for the last six months. You can buy it directly from the App Store.

If you like it and would like to help out, here are some of the things you can do to promote it:

• Go back to iTunes and write a fair review
• Grow flowers and send bouquets to your friends
• Join the Flower Garden group on Facebook
• Tell all your friends how great it is :-)

Thanks everybody for all the encouragement and support along the way. I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed creating it.

And don’t worry, this is just the beginning. I have lots of updates planned, so keep an eye out for lots of fun new features!

With all the excitement last week with GDC and the last push for Flower Garden, I completely forgot to announce that I submitted Flower Garden to Apple last Friday. It’s currently listed “In Review” and hopefully, if all goes well, will be available on the App Store either this weekend or early next week. Keeping my fingers crossed!

Yes, GDC is around the corner.

Yes, I’m supposed to ship Flower Garden this Friday.

But none of that is stopping us. Come mingle with other iPhone developers this Wednesday at the Irish Pub in Carlsbad. As a bonus, I’ll do a practice run of my GDC talk about iPhone development (now that’s an old picture!).

When: Wednesday March 18th from 7:30PM until whenever. Where: O’Sullivan’s Pub in Carlsbad (home of the Appy Entertainment Secret World Headquarters)

If you’re thinking of coming, please RSVP by leaving a comment below or emailing me. That way we get a rough idea of how many people to expect.

See you all in a couple of days!

I’ll be sharing my experiences transitioning from traditional AAA console game development, with teams of 100+ people, multi-million budgets, and several years of development, to indie iPhone development. There are a surprising amount of things that carry over from “big game development”, and quite a few that are totally different. I’ll go into what’s involved making games for the iPhone, and what game developers can expect when making the transition.

Apart from my talk, I’m particularly excited about this year’s GDC. It seems that the amount of content on indie game development and iPhone game development has shot through the roof. On Monday and Tuesday we’re treated to not just one, but two great summits: The Independent Games Summit and GDC Mobile! Last year, the Independent Games Summit was the best part of the show. Meeting all the other indie game developers out there and hearing their experiences was great. This year I’m hoping for more of the same plus all the iPhone-specific content.

Of course, the main conference is packed with great content too, but I haven’t had time to go through all of it and pick the sessions I want to attend yet. Too busy wrapping up my current project.

So if you see me around the show, stop by and say hi. I’m always glad to meet other fellow developers, and it’s always nice to put a face with a name for those of you that I know know through Twitter or online blogs.

In the next few days I’m going to start beta testing, so if you’re interested in participating, let me know.

More info coming soon…

So we’re back at it again. Anybody involved in iPhone development or interested in learning more about it is welcome to come.

When: Wednesday Feb 11th from 8PM until whenever. Where O’Sullivan’s Pub in Carlsbad (home of the Appy Entertainment Secret World Headquarters)

If you’re interested, you might also want to join the San Diego iPhone Developers group to keep up to date with any future announcements.

See you all there!

A couple of weeks ago, prompted by seeing a few other indie iPhone devs on Twitter, I decided to give it another try. I’m glad I did! It has been really fun and useful. Unlike Facebook, which is all about connecting with long-lost friends, and seeing pictures people’s new babies, I’m using Twitter exclusively for iPhone development. I keep my follow list to a relatively small amount of people, all of them independent iPhone game developers (so please, don’t feel offended if you’re a friend and I’m not following you).

My routine now consists on sitting to work with a warm cup of tea, firing up the Twitter client du jour, and let it sit in the background (without alerts, thank you). Every so often I check it out, update my status, read what other devs are up to, and get into short conversations. The effect is surprisingly similar to being back working with a team of people and having quick IM conversations with them. Don’t get me wrong, I love working by and for myself, but I do miss the camaraderie, the interactions, and the energy of working with a team of really talented people. Twitter gives me a lot of what I’ve been missing.

Last night, @timhaines put together a Google Spreadsheet of iPhone devs on Twitter, along with a form to add yourself. He sent out a Twitter message asking people to add themselves and pass the word. The effect was stunning. Within minutes there were dozens of devs on the list, and as people continued re-tweeting the message, hundreds more were added! That’s a great resource to hook up with your favorite iPhone developers.

On a similar note, Sam Houston put together a list of video game companies with people on Twitter. That’s not quite as interesting for me right now, but seems like another great resource if you’re into video game development.

So give Twitter a try. Especially if you’re an indie developer working by yourself. Don’t think of it as another Facebook, but as a way to chat and develop connections with other people.

See you there!

So last week, I was excited to learn there was a new iPhone development conference  called 360|iDev (not the greatest conference name–sounds too much like an Xbox development conference). It looks like a very hands-on, for developers by developers kind of conference, instead of half-marketing, half-development like Apple’s offerings (Yes, we’re already on board, you don’t have to sell us on how cool the iPhone is. We know. We’ve banked our life and savings on it actually). The lineup of speakers looks really promising (including Urban Tycoon author, Mike Huntington).

What really excites me the most is meeting the other attendees though. It looks like it’s not going to be a huge conference (hundreds instead of thousands or tens of thousands like GDC), and we’re all staying at the same hotel, so there should be plenty of opportunities to meet people, chat, trade tips, and compare horror stories over beers.

I actually liked the idea so much, that I decided to jump in and submit a session proposal, and the organizers very kindly accepted it (which is great because otherwise I might not have been able to have afforded going :-)). I’ll be talking about my experience going from a AAA console development environment, to a single-person iPhone development team. Both the obvious differences, the not so obvious similarities, and how a single person can really deliver a top-notch iPhone game.

I encourage everybody to have a look at the 360|iDev site and register if you haven’t already. It’s not very expensive (especially if you buy the ticker sooner, rather than later), and it’s going to be a blast. It’s in San Jose in early March, a couple of weeks before GDC, so no conflicts for game developers there. Also, if you’re interested in speaking, check out their call for speakers while they’re still accepting new submissions. I hope to see some of you there!

On a totally different note, a couple of weeks ago, Evan at Veiled Games (Up There), which is one of my favorite indie iPhone developers, promised to put a daily image with a teaser of their upcoming project. This was soon picked up by Gavin at Antair Games, who is letting us peek under the covers of what’s coming up after Sneezies.

I figured it would be fun to follow their steps, but don’t hold your breath of a daily update. Maybe weekly if you’re lucky. Maybe.

So here’s this week’s teaser. Draw whatever conclusions you want from it :-)

What am I doing writing a little app like that? Don’t worry, that’s not what I’ve been doing for the last few months :-) It was an experiment to see how quick I could put a simple app together and getting the experience of going through the whole cycle with the App Store. Tomorrow I’ll write an entry with all that I’ve learned so far.

Enjoy your tea!

When: Wednesday January 14th from 7PM until whenever Where: Karl Strauss Brewery in Mira Mesa

Hope to see you all there!

This being Southern California, cars are an inevitable reality. So what do I do while I’m stuck in my tiny subcompact hatchback? Devour every broadcast of TedTalks. I’m totally, irreversibly hooked on that podcast. And now, we finally have our own game industry podcast.

Ryan Wiancko, over at Industry Broadcast, has started recording articles from several of the top game development blogs. I’m happy to announce that he has added Games from Within to the list of articles he’s recording. He started with the oldie-but-goodie Optimizing the Content Pipeline that I wrote for Game Developer Magazine a few years ago (Note to self: I need to write an updated version of that article with my current thinking on the topic). He’ll be adding some of the most popular articles from the site as well as covering new entries.

So fill up your iPod with juicy game development recordings and have them handy wherever you go.

Now I’m 100% feed driven. Content is pushed to me, and not the other way around. Interestingly, the number of sites I keep up with has gone up significantly (over 100 by last count) so it’s still as time consuming as it was earlier. I just get a lot more information during the same amount of time.

So, for those of your who use the RSS feeds (and I hope it’s 99% of you out there, if not, head over to Google Reader right now), I just enabled two new types of feeds:

• Feed with full content. No more annoying excerpts and having to click through.
• Feed with all the comments. So you can follow any discussions more easily.

As a side note, WordPress totally rocks. I’ve used other blog systems before, but the latest version of WordPress is so slick, configurable, and easy to work with that it’s a real pleasure. Adding new themes or plugins is as simple as downloading a file and administration is done 100% through a super-slick web interface. Definitely better than MovableType, and light-years ahead of the hulking, slow beast of Drupal.

To give you an idea of how much I’m liking WordPress, I’m even using it to write posts. Seriously, that’s no small feat for me. I usually loathe online editors, and always composed the text offline and then pasted it into the blog at the last minute. With WordPress I feel totally comfortable composing posts on the fly, which makes the whole process very painless (which hopefully translates into more posts :-).