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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. ...

One of the unintended side effects of my previous post on the horrible memory situation on the iPhone, was that some people pointed out it was possible to hook up a disk storage back end to the iPhone’s virtual memory system. That’s quite ironic because I think of it as compounding the already dismal situation rather than a solution or a even a stopgap measure. As far as I’m concerned, virtual memory paging is the lazy man’s caching scheme. There, I’ve said it. Now let me qualify it a bit and justify why I feel that way. ...

My recent rant about the dismal situation of memory in the iPhone quickly became quite popular. Most people were either unaware of the situation, or completely agreed that it was a major stumbling block for any app that tries to make good use of the hardware. As a response to that post, some people suggested some intriguing ways to increase the available memory on the iPhone. I’ve been experimenting with that a bit, but I don’t have any conclusive solutions yet. Right now it’s all totally unreliable hacks. Hopefully in a followup post I can present some solutions. ...

I love developing for the iPhone. It’s a really fun machine. Small enough to allow very small teams to create great apps, but at the same time powerful enough that you can do some really impressive games. The tools are great, the iteration time is great. It’s was a pleasure all around developing Flower Garden. Except when it comes to memory, that is. I really like most of the design calls that Apple made designing the software for the iPhone: Using C and Objective C (instead of Javascript or web-only apps), building it on top of a Unix-like core, and even providing OpenGL (although I would love to have lower-level access to the graphics hardware). ...

Come join us for the next iPhone developers meet-up. This should be an interesting one with lots of things to share after GDC and the launch of several local apps (Sky Burger, Appy Newz, Flower Garden and more!). 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 :-) ...

The latest podcast from Mobile Orchard covers my interview describing my experience as an indie iPhone developer and how Flower Garden was developed. I was particularly pleased when Dan Grigsby invited me to do the interview because the Mobile Orchard podcast is one of the two podcasts I listen regularly (the other one being TED Talks). 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. ...

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!

Things have been so busy ever since I got back from GDC that I never got a chance to upload the slides for my GDC presentation. So here they are. You can download the Keynote file directly from here, or view it online. The presentation went very well. The room was *completely* packed, with every seat taken and people standing along the walls. In retrospect I shouldn’t be surprised because it was the only iPhone presentation in the main GDC conference. Clearly there is a huge amount of interest in the platform. I’m already pushing to have a lot more iPhone content for next year, so you can all look forward to that. ...

A few weeks ago, I set as my drop-dead, better-be-done-or-I-kill-myself date for Flower Garden to be March 20th. The date getting closer allowed me to focus and put a huge, hard effort. Since I got back from 360iDev, I’ve been working between 18 and 20 hours per day. Yes, that’s pretty crazy, but it actually didn’t feel like a strain because a) I love doing this and b) I can do it from the comfort of my own home. But that’s the topic for another post. ...

Yes, it’s a horribly busy month. 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) ...

One of the most confusing parts of iPhone development is dealing with the iPhone Developer Program side of things. You know, all that fun stuff with certificates, devices, provisioning profiles, distribution profiles, etc. Oh, the hours of “fun” you can spend with that. Last night was particularly frustrating because I had just called it “beta” on Flower Garden and celebrated with the requisite victory dance, when the fun of sending out the beta build started. What I thought would be a ten-minute task, turned into a long nightmare and I didn’t get the build out until 1AM. ...

Here are the slides for the 360iDev presentation I gave a few minutes ago. They’re in Keynote format. Thanks everybody for coming and all the questions at the end. It was lots of fun! Session description: This session will cover the experiences of a professional game developer, used to 200+ person teams, multi-million dollar budgets, and 3+ year schedules, who left all that behind to become a one-person indie company developing exclusively for the iPhone. It will explain how things are different and how some things are very much the same, and will show specific examples of graphics technology, development environment, and asset pipeline. I will be using my current iPhone project, Flower Garden, as an example. The audience will learn what the transition is like and what to expect going indie making games for the iPhone. ...

Today I join the ranks of proud iPhone owners (maybe not so much in Japan though). Yes, it an extra expense I can barely afford, but my previous cell phone contract was pretty much over and it made sense. So far I had been doing all my development on an iPod Touch, but I could really use a real iPhone for beta testing Flower Garden with all the reports of significant performance differences between the iPod Touch 2nd gen and iPhone. Besides, with 360iDev and GDC coming up, being able to have constant internet access for email and Twitter is a huge bonus. ...

It seems like GDC was just the other day, but GDC 2009 is around the corner! And this year, I’m going to be giving a presentation titled iPhone Development: Exploring The New Frontier I’m sorry about reverting to the cliched format of having a colon in the presentation title. It was too hard to resist :-). 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. ...