2009: The Year of The Indie Developer?

A few days ago I went out to lunch with some friends and they brought up an interesting thought: Will 2009 be the year of the indie developer?

I loved the sound of that! I’ve been an indie developer for a year and a half, and I’m seeing more and more people taking tha route. I think indie development is necessary for a healthy game development industry. Where else are people going to try weird ideas, experimental development techniques, an commercially unproven designs? I think it’s a sign of maturity that we’re seeing a need filled by independent development next to the Maddens and Worlds of Warcraft and other chart-toppers.

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iPhone from A Game Developer’s Perspective: Objective C

I have a feeling I don’t fit the profile for the average iPhone developer. I bet a lot of them come from Mac or Web development backgrounds. On the other hand, I come from over the years of professional game development on consoles and PCs, which gives me a different perspective on things. When I hear developers complaining about Apple’s approval process to put something on the App Store, I can’t help but laugh and wish they had a taste of submitting an Xbox or PS3 game for approval. Now, that’s a real bitch! On the other hand, long-time Mac developers will be throwing around all these API names and classes like everybody learned them in kindergarden.

I’ve only been doing iPhone development for a few months, so I don’t claim to know everything. But they have been some intensive couple of months, that’s for sure. This is my attempt to share my experiences, and hopefully encourage more game developers to take the leap and consider this really fun little machine.

As I explained in a previous post, I was a Mac-virgin. Sure, I had used one here and there, but never as my primary platform. Not only was I able to get up to speed and functional in a matter of days, but I totally love it and switched to it as my main computer. So, with that out of the way, how about the iPhone development itself? Over the next few days (or weeks, depending how busy I get), I’ll try and cover the major areas of iPhone development that I’ve experienced so far.

Let’s get the most obvious one out of the way: Objective C.

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No Rest for The Indies

You’d think that things would slow down around Christmas time over here. And that I would have lots of time to catch up and write about all the things I keep jotting down in my overflowing “to write” list. Right? Unfortunately that’s not the case.

I do want to catch up and share my iPhone development experience with everybody, but it’s hard to make time, even during the holidays. To make things worse, I have a pretty hard deadline I set myself to have my iPhone app ready by early February.

It’s funny, I’ve worked more hours in the last year than any other year during my career, but it has never felt like work. Quite the opposite actually, and I find myself doing “work” instead of other things that used to be more fun and having a blast with it. For example, my game-playing time has gone waaay down. If I have an hour that I can do anything, I think “oh, maybe I can play a bit of World of Warcraft now” followed by “but it would be so much fun to finally add this other feature…” I let you figure out which one ends up winning in the end. If it wasn’t because of my weekly WoW session with Jim, Joey, and Michael, I wouldn’t make any progress in the game!

Not only am I enjoying what I do immensely, but it’s very easy to spend lots of time doing it because I get to do it from the comfort of my own home. I never have to worry about getting to work by a particular time, so I can get in my morning runs or go grocery shopping when the stores are empty, I have all my stuff around me, my work area has an incredible view overlooking the whole of Mission Valley, and my kitchen is stocked up with all my favorite teas. It’s really easy to spend hours and hours working. A bit too easy actually.

Burnout is the evil flip side of fun work. Even with incredibly rewarding and fun work, doing something for many hours a day can burn me out pretty easily. The symptoms are obvious: I start to lose interest, I’m not as productive, my mind wanders, and I find all sorts of other things I’d rather be doing. Fortunately, I can recognize those symptoms early on, so just backing off a bit, or taking an afternoon off, allows me to walk the fine line between work and burnout and keeps me productive.

Initially I was a bit concerned about the thought of working full time from home. Would I miss the interaction with coworkers and the sparks and new ideas from seeing all sorts of stuff around me in a company. It turns out that it wasn’t anything to be worried about. Thanks to the Internet, it’s very easy to reach out and connect with other people. I regularly share my progress with some friends and family members, and I always enjoy hearing their comments and reactions (even the not so positive ones–especially those actually). I also meet in a semi-regularly basis with my friend Dave, who is doing all the graphic design for my app (and he’s the mastermind behind the Power of Two logo).  Those meetings are always very inspiring, and usually result in all sorts of new ideas flying around and a flurry of activity in the days following.

Having non-work related hobbies really helps to keep me from spending too much time on work. Training for half marathons (I keep saying that one of these days I’ll do a full marathon–we’ll see about that), or just getting back in shape to do a century on my bike require quite a time commitment and keep me in shape and in top mental shape.

I suppose this is exactly the feeling that some companies try to encourage in their employees. They hire people who are really passionate about their work, give them the means and the freedom to do it, and hope they pour their heart into it. They just have to hope that their employees are able to keep themselves from burning out. That might be easier if you’re forced to work from an office environment, totally separate from home. On the other hand, being away from your family for longs periods of time eventually takes a toll on happiness and morale.

That’s a totally different beast from the kind of crunch that is rampant in the games industry. I define crunch as having to mandate long work hours (either explicitly or through peer pressure–which is more sublte and infinitely more evil). In one case, you’re so passionate about what you’re doing that you can’t wait to go back to work on Monday morning. In the other case, you’re still stuck to your desk come Monday morning because you were forced to work the weekend and get a build ready for some marketing demo. One is a very rewarding life, the other is soul-draining. One results in happy, ultra-productive people and the other degenerates into a death march, people leaving, and projects being even more delayed.

So, even with the February deadline looming, I want to take a few more hours these next few days and get back into the wrting swing of things. Besides, with the app coming up so soon, I should start thinking about announcing it soon! First I need to wrap up the Game Developer Magazine column due on Monday, but after that, I’ll try to start posting regular updates.

Until then, happy holidays to everybody. I hope you’re taking some time off, or at least doing what you really love.

Build Server: The Heartbeat of The Project

Have you ever given some thought to why you decided to become a game programmer? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t to do mundane, repetitive tasks. Yet sometimes we find ourselves spending a significant portion of our time making sure that the code compiles for all platforms, or that there are no potential bugs lurking in the depths of the game, or even building the assets for each level and running them to make sure they load correctly.

Clearly, those are all things that need to be done, but if they are so repetitive and mindless, couldn’t we put some of the computers around us to good use and have them do the job for us?

A build server will do all that and more, much faster and more reliably than we could, and it will free us to work on the thing that made us fall in love with this industry in the first place: the game.

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Stranger in a Mac Land

I’ve worked with many operating systems over the years: from the humble CP/M, to early versions of DOS, to  Windows 3.0 (if you can even call that an OS), along with many different versions of Linux since 1993, a smattering of VMS, and, of course, all the recent flavors of Windows. But somehow, I always managed to avoid Apple operating systems.

Starting iPhone development was a bit of a change since it required me to work exclusively under OSX and use a new IDE (XCode). I had talked to people who found the change very cumbersome and found the new environment got in their way, so I approached it with a bit of trepidation.

It’s An OS X World

With my new Macbook Pro under my arm (actually, it wasn’t new, I bought it used off Craigslist because I couldn’t afford a new one), I embarked on an adventure to this strange, new world of OS X development.

Some background is necessary here: I”m a minimalistic, no frills kind of guy when it comes to my preferences when working with computers (although now that I think about it, it probably applies to most other things in my life as well). The first thing I do with a new install of Windows is turn off all the GUI animations (don’t get me started on the search puppy dog!!), most of the sounds, all the auto-complete and auto-spellcheck features, and automatic upgrades. When I want the computer to do something, I’ll tell it to do so. Otherwise I want it to be quiet and responsive.

My ideal Visual Studio setup is also pretty similar: No fancy web startup page, no animations, no autocompletions by default (unless I press CTRL-Space), out with all the toolbars, just give me two text windows side by side and control everything from keyboard shortcuts (which I’m still using the ones from Visual C++ 6.0).

Needless to say, I was afraid of clashing with Mac OSX’s environment. I had a suspicious that it was full of eye candy, GUI frills, and required a mouse for everything. Not a good match.

There wasn’t as much of a learning curve as some getting-used-to. There are some Mac quirkiness that I just don’t get: The disembodied menu on the top of the screen, the lack of change of mouse cursor when you can resize a window, or not being able to automatically restore a file to its original location from the recycle bin.

But those are all relatively small things that don’t overshadow the fact that I just love this new environment. I used to like the Windows fonts, but after a week of using a Mac, I can’t go back to those tiny, jaggedy Windows fonts. Handling of multiple monitors is perfectly integrated and works like a charm. In general, things Just Work (TM).

Then there are the things that I love from my time in Linux that I can’t live without: Multiple desktops with Spaces, a decent command line shell, or being able to tweak settings directly in low-level config files.

And the thing that has changed how I work the most: Spotlight. No need for icons everywhere, or “Start | Programs” or anything. Just start typing what you want and there it is. It’s like the return of the command line on steroids. Between Spotlight, Firefox smart locaton bar, GMarks, and Ubiquity, I feel right at home. Now combine them all somehow and I’ll be in heaven!

But Wait, What About Windows?

I ended up falling in love with OS X so much, that I quickly moved to it as my primary environment at home for everything. Frankly, these days, it’s pretty easy for me to change environments since most of what I do is online. Just give me Firefox (or a good browser) and I’m there: GMail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Docs (hmm… I sense a theme here), and a Wiki cover most of what I do on a daily basis.

For the rest of the apps, almost everything I need runs under OS X: good media visualizer (Preview), photograph organizer (Lightroom), image editor (The Gimp/Photoshop), audio editor (Audacity), music player (iTunes), and a few more odds and ends. OS X comes with some great utilities out of the box too, like Grab, Preview, or Activity Monitor.

Unfortunately, there are still a couple of things that I can only run under Windows. The main thing are games unfortunately, so I need to keep my Windows box around just for that. Although I just started playing World of Warcraft and it runs great on my Mac. Thanks Blizzard! Apart from that, every so often I need to do something in Visual Studio, or run some application I wrote in .Net. For that, I go about it in two different ways.

I can run it on the Windows box itself. Instead of keeping two sets of keyboards and mice (or a switch box), I used Synergy for a while. It was pretty cool being able to move the mouse cursor from one screen on the Mac to the screen on Windows and continue working there, and that might be a great solution if you’re working 50-50 on both platforms. In my case, it was more like 90-10 at the time (more like 99.9 to 0.1 now), so it felt a bit of a waste to have a full monitor dedicated to Windows. Instead, I decided to use Remote Desktop to control my Windows computer from the Mac. Amazingly enough, Microsoft wrote a Remote Desktop app for OS X that works like a charm, much better than some of the VNC programs I tried.

Whenever I don’t need to run something that is performance critical, I reach for Fusion. I’ve tried many products in the past that claim to run programs for another platform in your own computer: Wine, CrossOver Office, earlier versions of VMWare, but they’re always plagued by problems and incompatibilities. VMWare Fusion really surprised me by running anything I threw at it flawlessly, including Quicken (yes, I need to switch to Mint or Buxfer) and some hardware-accelerated 3D programs (those were a bit chuggy though, but they worked). And the coolest feature ever: Unity–I can run Windows apps in a window of their own directly on the Mac desktop. Totally awesome! On top of all that, I can have multiple snapshots, restore earlier states, and I can even run other operating systems like different versions of Linux. A geek’s true dream!

Some people will claim that I have drunk from the Apple kool-aid, and to a certain extent, they’re right. But I’d like to think I was swayed by many good reasons having to do with using the computer and being more productive, rather than Apple’s brainwashy, lifestyle marketing message. That and the smooth feel of the Macbook against the palm of my hands, its sleek profile, and sexy design. 🙂

What about XCode and development? That’s another story for another day.