Get Your Games from Within Fix on The Go

I hate driving. You have to deal with crowded roads and people who seem to be doing their best to get in your way. Worst of all, it’s dead time: you can’t read, you can’t write, you can’t use a computer, or even take a quick cat nap. So I really try to minimize how long I spend on a car and try to do everything remotely, or walk or ride my bike instead.

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.

Feed Yourself

I’m lost without feeds. In the last few years, my mode of operation with teh itarwebs has gone from poll to push. I used to have a set of bookmarks that I would visit every week. As the rate of change picked up, I started visiting every day, but it soon became overwhelming.

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:

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 :-).

Brave New iPhone World

I know that things have been very quiet over here for the last few weeks. Lots of stuff happening and it’s hard to find time to write sometimes. But now I should be getting back into the swing of things and updating Games from Within more regularly.

The big news is that we decided to call it quits on Power of Two Games. It was an amazing experience and I learned a huge amount. I’m sure we’ll write a postmortem with some of the gems we learned along the way sometime soon. Unlike most postmortems, we really don’t have any office politics, bosses to suck up to, or publishers to keep happy, we’ll be able to be brutally honest.

Against my better judgement, especially with the current horrible economy, I’m still burning the indie development candle. This time by myself and on the iPhone. I’ll get into many more details in the future, but so far iPhone development has been surprisingly fun and smooth.

One of the most attractive things about iPhone development is the short projects. Some of the top selling iPhone applications were written in just a week or two. The game/toy I’m working on is a bit more involved than a fart generator or a rotary dial, so I expect it will take me a total of three months. Still, much better than trying to make a game for XBLA or PSN!

Another big plus of iPhone development is the approval process. Yes, Apple needs to approve the application, but the process is infinitely simpler than trying to certify your PS3 or 360 game. I haven’t gone through that myself yet, but that’s what I keep hearing from other developers.

And then you have the App Store. Ah, the App Store. A captive audience of impulse-buyers with their credit cards already in the system because of iTunes. Genius. The cut that Apple takes is very reasonable, just 30%. Let’s hope they keep it that way and don’t pull the Microsoft move on us!

So, what’s not to like? That everybody and their grandmother is writing iPhone apps and throwing them on the App Store on the hopes of making a quick buck. And the worst thing is that it’s actually working. So people keep gambling with crappy apps hoping to become the next iBeer or Koi Pond. As a result, the App Store is flooded with stuff, most of it horrible, some OK, a few good, and a very few great apps. Right now the App Store interface isn’t ideal for discovering new, high-quality games and applications, and most of the exposure is limited to the Top Seller lists. I’m hoping in the next few months they move towards something more along the lines of Amazon.

And speaking of interfaces, whose retarded idea was it to only be able to access the App Store from within iTunes? I like Apple, and I’m totally digging Mac OS X (more on that later), but I hate having to use a slow, bloated application to do something that amounts to browsing a few web pages. Besides, you’d think they would hook more people by making it more accessible. Oh well. That’s not changing any time soon.

Stay tuned for more updates on my iPhone development adventures and maybe, just maybe, an early glimpse of the game 🙂

Bad News for Scons Fans

We have been talking a lot about Scons recently at the Power of Two Games World Headquarters. MSBuild has proven to be quite a pain to work with for our asset builds and eventually left us dissatisfied (that’s material for a whole other entry). So we kept looking over to Scons as a possible solution. Continue reading →

Back to The Future (Part 2)

I really enjoy a good cup of tea. On the surface, making tea is really easy: take some tea leaves, pour some hot water over them, and wait a few minutes. In practice, the difference between a bitter, undrinkable brew, and a perfect cup of tea is all in the details; the type and amount of tea, the temperature of the water, and the steeping, time all make a huge difference. A playback system for a game is very much the same. As we saw last month, the basic idea is really simple: Record all game inputs, make the game deterministic, and you get the same playback every time. Unfortunately things aren’t quite that simple in real life. Just as with tea making, the secret to a perfect playback system is all in the details. Continue reading →