Posts

Full disclosure: Apress asked me to review this book and sent me a free copy. I agreed with my usual condition of being able to really say what I thought about the book, good or bad. So here it is. TL;DR Great book for someone starting out on iOS development. You would be at a severe disadvantage if you don’t know about most practices described in the book. Single resource for lots of good practices you’d have to pick up from blogs or Twitter otherwise. ...

The App Store today is a different beast from the one in early 2009, when iShoot ruled the charts. Look at the top paid games on the App Store today. Actually, don’t worry, I did all the leg work for you. Here they are: What can we tell by looking at those games? I see two clear categories: Games with a strong, established IP (Street Fighter, Sonic), or independent games with a huge amount of polish and style. ...

Pocket Gamer just picked Snappy Touch as a top-50 developer for mobile and portable devices for the year. I’m really honored they counted me among the best 50 of the year, especially on a year with so many great games and new developers. 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! ...

I’m thrilled to present a guest post by Ian Marsh, 1/2 of the independent studio (and wildly successful) NimbleBit. They’re the creators of iPhone hits such as Pocket Frogs, Scoops, and Sky Burger, and they recently announced they reached 20 million downloads on the App Store__! One of the most important steps on the way to becoming a profitable independent iOS developer is diversifying your revenue stream.  While business lingo like that makes me throw up a little, all it really means is discovering all the ways you can earn money using the platform.  New developers sometimes pigeonhole themselves into a single App Store strategy: “Sell as many copies at 99 cents as possible”.  More savvy developers mix  multiple strategies: “Paid apps”, “In-App Purchases”, and “Advertising”.  I want to make sure all developers know about another additional option often overlooked: LinkShare. ...

Two years ago, when I was working on the first release of Flower Garden, Valentine’s Day was my target ship date. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), I missed it and rescheduled it for April. Last year I was eagerly awaiting the Valentine’s Day features hoping for a feature by Apple, but Flower Garden wasn’t one of the apps to be selected. It was disappointing but understandable given how many newer quality apps are out there. ...

So much for “weekly” updates. Last time I wrote one was Oct 29. Oops! That’s what happens when I get really busy and then the holidays hit. But now that’s over (the holiday part at least), so I’ll write to write more frequent updates. This Week This week Miguel and I are wrapping up our current iteration with the main focus of the first five minutes of gameplay. The reason we’re doing this now is that we spent quite a bit of time on the user interaction experience and we tried to nail that before adding more items and more levels. All along, we’ve been testing the game with unsuspecting victims and we quietly watched over their shoulders as they fumbled with the game without any instructions or tutorials. ...

There has been a lot of recent discussion (and criticism) on Data Oriented Design recently. I want to address some of the issues that have been raised, but before that, I’ll start with this reprint from my most recent Game Developer Magazine. If you have any questions you’d like addressed, add write a comment and I’ll try to answer everything I can. Last year I wrote about the basics of Data-Oriented Design (see the September 2009 issue of Game Developer). In the time since that article, Data-Oriented Design has gained a lot of traction in game development and many of teams are thinking in terms of data for some of the more performance-critical systems. ...

It’s that time of the year again. We all look back at what happened and have high hopes for the coming year. For me this marked my fourth year as an indie developer. It’s not a huge milestone by any standard, but the fact that I’ve been going at it for this long and I’m not broke yet means it’s a sustainable business. Actually, as you know if you followed some of my numbers posts, this was the first year that income from my apps finally became (reasonably) profitable. Now, *that* is something worth celebrating! ...

This is a new guest post by Frederic My. Frederic and I worked together in the past in big console games development, and now we’re both enjoying the indie life and making games for mobile platforms. Frederic is sharing with us how the development of his first Windows Phone 7 game went. Thanks Frederic! New beginning When my job position got terminated last summer, I decided I would take a break from working for big companies, and try to make a game on my own at home. I’ve been in the video game industry since the late nineties, I’ve written code for a few released PC and console AAA titles and probably as many canceled ones, and I wanted to do something different at least for a few months. Go back to the roots of game development, when one or two guys could create something in their garage or bedroom, without spending years and millions of dollars on it. ...

About 48 hours ago, I participated in the 360iDev Game Jam. I’m still recovering from the sleep deprivation and caffeine excesses, but here are some random thoughts about the game jam and why I highly recommend the experience to all developers. This was my third 360iDev Game Jam, and it gets better all the time. It’s great to see that it has become a 360iDev tradition, and that the number of people participating is going up every time. The last couple of times we had one invited guest to participate remotely (and preside over everybody else in the big video screen), but this time we opened it up so anybody, anywhere in the world could join us and participate in the updates and discussions through the web site (big thanks for Mike Berg for all the excellent work on the web site!). ...

I finally managed to get through the hotel wifi and upload the slides for this morning’s 360iDev talk: The Power Of In-App Purchases. Thanks everybody who attended for the great questions and feedback! Session description The common-sense approach to make money on the App Store used to be to do anything to get on the top charts. In-app purchases changed all of that. Good in-app purchases can make your app profitable without being anywhere on the charts, and are the best hope for the independent developer. Come to this session to learn why IAPs can be so effective and how to leverage them effectively: what makes a good IAP, how to increase your user involvement, how to present IAPs in an attractive way, what things attract users, and what things turn them away. We’ll go through lots of detailed real-world data from Flower Garden and other games with strong IAPs. ...

In the last year and a half, I’ve written about the different things that I’ve tried with Flower Garden and their effects on sales. From adding Facebook support, creating a free version, adding in-app purchases, or giving Flower Garden for free for a limited time. Some strategies worked and some didn’t. Today I want to share my latest experiment, and how it was a total and complete failure: Adding the option to gift IAP items from within the game. ...

I like to be as open as possible about any project I’m working on, whether it’s giving talks, sharing technology, or discussing sales numbers. That goes for projects in progress too, although sometimes it makes sense to wait a while before announcing them. In the case of Casey’s Contraptions, we had an early announcement because of the IGF entry, so we might as well start talking about the game. At one point I was half-seriously toying with the idea of creating a Twitter account that would show our latest commits to Subversion. Apart from the 140 character limit, that falls in the TMI category. ...

It’s no secret that I like a good conference. Actually, I’m sure I can find something to enjoy even at a so-so conference. Each field has it’s big, ultimate conference: For games it’s GDC, for graphics SIGGRAPH, and for iPhone development WWDC. Those big conferences have the big announcements, the big crowds, and the big players. But the smaller conferences always have something a unique to them that the big ones can’t compete against. ...

One of the more frequent questions I receive is what kind of memory allocation strategy I use in my games. The quick answer is none (at least frame to frame, I do some allocation at the beginning of each level on a stack-based allocator). This reprint of one of my Inner Product column covers quite well how I feel about memory allocation. We’ve all had things nagging us in the back of our minds. They’re nothing we have to worry about this very instant, just something we need to do sometime in the future. Maybe that’s changing those worn tires in the car, or making an appointment with the dentist about that tooth that has been bugging you on and off. ...