Well, its about time!

Its been way too long since I've updated my blog, so decided its about time I let all my adoring fans know what I've been up to for the last 6 months (all 7 of them <3)...

So, I discovered Unity (www.unity3d.com). If you don't know what Unity is, its basically a development tool that can be used for creating 2D/3D games, with more of an emphasis on 3D. The beauty of Unity, is it takes away the more painful parts of developing a 3D game. Unity handles all the difficult rendering/physics related stuff to do with 3D engines (and a bunch of other stuff I wont mention). The parts that are generally hugely time consuming to understand and develop. To someone like me that doesn't have a huge interest in that side of 3D game development, this is HUGE (with capitals to emphasize just how truly awesome I think this is!!!)

I'm more interested in the visuals and game mechanics side of game dev, so for me to be able to throw in a few models, and write a few scripts in C# and whip up something that would have taken me years in just a few months is truly phenomenal. Granted there is still months of development work to go (as a one man band its all about the time I put in around the rest of my life).

But I'm getting my head around it, and have managed to create a few tech demos which while not showing a lot of gameplay, show some of the work that has been done.

You can see the two demo's here:

This was the initial design idea for the game (realistic terrains):
http://www.fingerbait.com/TechDemos/TurretDemo/WebPlayer.html

After playing around with some different visual settings and performance, I decided to go with a different approach to the game board shown here:
http://www.fingerbait.com/TechDemos/CubeDemo/WebPlayer.html

So over the coming months, I expect to get my first game done and hopefully out the door.

But for now its 3D ON!

Keeping it up...

One of the main reasons I was always opposed to starting a blog has become a reality. Im not keeping it up.

Why you might ask? Obviously because I have nothing of value to submit to the interwebs right now. I never really wanted the blog to be a boring submission of my day to day tasks, and/or social life on the weekend. I’m certainly no Katy Perry when it comes to my Friday nights, which generally consist of staying home and entertaining myself through gaming/drinking/movies. Hardly exciting reading material for the average user. Who wants to read about someone doing the same thing they’re doing? Not me. BORING! Most people are more interested in living vicariously through others.

 What I really wanted to do with my blog was follow my development lifecycle with iOS game development, use it as lessons learnt for others wanting to follow the tricky path of making it as a game developer, of course that’s been a bit slow for me lately.

I just haven’t had the drive to work on my games. I haven’t had the drive to do much of anything if I was really going to be honest with myself! Maybe it’s the winter blues, maybe it’s because I’ve let myself slip into some kind of stale creative lull. I think if I was to analyse the cause of my problem, it is probably due to my lack of exercise.

Its amazing how exercise not only pumps up the body, but the mind as well. I was a reasonably active surfer up until a month or two ago when the cold arrived. Since the arrival of winter, I’ve allowed myself to do nothing. All that eating/drinking/lack of exercise has obviously thickened my brain (and fattened my waistline).

So bring on the warmer climate I say. To all those twats that think winter is awesome, you are all fools. Winter brings cold, wet, hibernative (is that even a word??) tendencies.

The hilarious offshoot from all of this is several of my friends felt somewhat inspired to kick off their own blogs... most of which have made 0-1 posts! awesome! At least I inspire mediocrity!

Feeling the burn...

I wish I could say this was because I just went for massive run, but theres a different meaning. The expression 'Burning the candle at both ends' comes to mind... Over the last few days Ive been a coding demon... I spent most of Saturday and Sunday working on my iphone developments... And a full day coding at work and several hours last night. Im now at Tuesday afternoon and I've been coding all day today as well, and my brain is feeling somewhat burnt out!

You see I found some inspiration on the weekend to work on my current game... To be honest, I spent alot of Saturday just playing around with graphics, and then I had this GREAT idea.

Of course, that great idea set me up to write some rather complex code, which I think I mostly finished up last night, which is fantastic (THANK F***)... you see I had to write a path finding algorithm... sounds easy enough, but it wasnt... Once I had created a flow diagram it was a lot easier to get my head around it, of course then I had to put it into code..

LOL.

There were several moments when I thought to myself... wtf are you on about... then I would stare blankly at the code for a while... you see the first few times I was testing it, it simply didnt work... Took me a while to realise one of my helper functions was returning somewhat unhelpful values (READ: WRONG!). Once I fixed this it mostly worked perfectly.

'Mostly worked perfectly'

Now theres an interesting way to put it...

Anyway... I think im mostly out of the rough so to speak and it should be smooth sailing from here on out...

We'll see...

JL

To blog or not to blog...

One of the main reasons I havnt gotten a blog until now is I wasnt sure what I would have to blog about... Is this blog going to be about my life? is it going to be about one part of my life? is this going to be a technical blog?

To tell you the truth, im still not sure!!

Do I feel like divulging a bunch of personal information, or what I did over the weekend on the interwebs? I mean all the cool kids are doing it right!? Right!? Is what I did on the weekend that interesting? If I dont talk about what I did on the weekend, will I have anything to say? Will it be on a regular basis? Chances are the answer to that is no!

So I guess that means this is gonna be a bit of both! Unfortunately, I dont have anything technical or entertaining to add to the interweb. I went to my cousins 40th on the weekend, and it was good to catch up with some of my cousins, but thats not really that interesting to you lot. What about my GF's antics! They were certainly a bit more interesting! She ended up with grazes all over her face after running into a tree. lol. The funny part was her getting talked to about domestic abuse by the lady at the vege store. HILARIOUS! Im just glad I wasnt there otherwise im sure I would have ended up with dirty looks! I probably wouldnt of had a problem admitting that she had actually done it while she was on a girls night out and was somewhat tipsy... she would of been a prime candidate for one of those 'Its not the drinking, its how we're drinking', or maybe the 'leave your friends at home' commercials... As I type this and consider posting it to the internet, I wonder if she will be pissed off at me. Ha... ONE WAY TO FIND OUT!! :P

As far as my iPhone development is going, its been a little slow over the last couple of days. I go through moods of excitement in a project... right now im at a loss for direction.I need to find some new inspiration for ideas to put into the current game. Ive got a lot of the basic stuff done, but it's all about the gloss and the shineys! Ive got some ideas about what I want to put in, so now its a case of figuring out how to slot them in. Im also considering making some changes to the basics of the game. Its a colour matching game that has a very specific requirement that im considering loosening up to make it a little easier. Im not giving away too much as im a little paranoid... you know, one of the MILLIONS of people that dont read my blog my steal my ideas!

But, is anybody even reading your blog?

Yep...


When I tell them to!

JL

The journey begins (about four months ago!)

So first up, why the name? Easy... This blog will be about the trials and tribulations of trying to beat the man... you know... the man... maybe if I say it as 'working for the man' you'll understand what the hell im on about.. anyway, as I said, the whole reason behind this blog is to track my path to enlightenment (working for myself!).. I will keep you in the loop about what im doing, and how its going... (so far SLOWLY!!) 

Admittedly, this will mainly be following my current path of making it as an iPhone games developer, because, well I always wanted to be a game developer, but following that path can be trickey at best, especially when you consider the fact ive always been a PC user and therefore a PC developer. What!? Yes thats right, im a PC user thats converting to Apple... I was always adament Apple was not for me, then I got an iPhone, and that was the catalyst for my conversion. Of course when I got my first iPhone I had no plans to try and develop software for it... That would mean I would have to (GASP!) buy a Mac!

As time has gone on, and Ive realised that there is a big market in smartphone games and that if im gonna beat the man in any way, shape, or form, its probably going to be doing something like this (winning the lottery hasnt quite worked out for me yet, although im still hanging on to that dream!).

But wait! what about Android!? Well thats a very good question. The honest truth is I'm being stubborn about wanting to give Apple development a good go first. I like the platform, ive invested time learning the language, so im going to stick to my guns. Im not saying I wont ever go down the Android path, but for now im concentrating on Apple. This may mean I never beat the man, but thats a gamble im willing to make right now.

So, where am I right now?

Same place I was when I first got my Mac, with the exception of having one game on the appstore, that isnt quite making the millions I imagined. Bummer.

So why am I not making millions!? Thats a tough question, but I guess the main answer is the game aint worth the dollar im trying to get people to part with, combined with low attention. At least Ive learnt one or two things in the last few months about iPhone games though. Maybe the next one will show me the money!

So what have I learnt?

Number 1, and this is a big one... Dont assume people will understand how to play your game. When I was developing the game and showing it to people, they all seemed to understand what they were doing, but that was probably because I was looking over their shoulder telling them what they are supposed to be doing. Turns out, when Im not there, people dont get what they are trying to do... in fact, some didnt even realise what you could do in game.

Number 2. People dont want to pay for your game... yet... If your game isnt free, people just wont try it. I could have the most amazing game EVER, but if no one is trying it, it aint worth anything. In App purchases are the only way to go. If your planning on releasing some games, make them free with in-app purchases as your first release. Dont be lazy like I was and figure you would put it in later. The problem I encountered with this was when I changed my purchase model, the people that had already paid for my game got screwed! The update made the full version they had already paid for go to a lite version with limited functionality. To those ten or so people, Im sorry. I didnt realise this was going to happen. If it makes you feel better, I've paid for my own game twice now! Its probably worth noting here, that since releasing the free version, its been downloaded 20x more (but then I only started with 10 downloads!)

Number 3. Dont do what I did and assume that because everyone youve showed your game has liked it and told you they would buy it, will. My first game wasnt the overnight sensation I thought it was going to be (BUT people told me they would buy it!?...). So what went wrong here? Not really sure... maybe they lied, maybe they were being kind, maybe they would buy it but have no idea its out.

Thats all i've really got for now, but hopefully there will be more soon. Im currently working on my new game so we will see what happens with that.

Until then, you can find my current game Revolver Revolutions on the appstore. Id would say go buy it, but if youre like any of the other 200 or so people who have downloaded it, you probably wont want to part with that dollar...

JL