Roblog

Hello all you beautiful people.  It’s been a while since my last post here.  A lot and not that much at all has happened since the last post.  I’ve tried out quite a few games and been reading through 10-year old Game Developer magazines.  I’ve also gotten up to speed on general iPad/iPhone development using Objective-C and the iPhone SDK.

I’ve been getting into the habit in the last few weeks of sitting down with a game I’ve never played and trying it out for an hour.  I have a few reasons for doing this: a) as a designer, I want to look at what other games are doing/have done, b) I want to analyze how well other games pull a gamer in within the first moments of a game and how much of the game the player can get a feel for in those moments and c) I like to play games.  My plan was/is to write up my impressions of the games I’ve been running through.  So pretty soon you should be able to look forward to some notes on Muramasa: The Demon Blade, Assassin’s Creed, NickToons Unite!, Open Season, Sonic Heroes, Sonic & Knuckles, Jimmy Neutron: Attack of the Twonkies, Kirby Air Ride, and World of Warcraft. As you may have noticed, I’ve been raiding my little brother’s library for titles I hadn’t played.

Reading through the old Game Developer magazines has been interesting.  Not only has there been a lot of great information I’ve left sitting on my shelves for all these years, but it’s pretty fun reliving the history of game development through articles written when I was in college.  I’ve been reading them chronologically and just got to 2002 last night, a time when the Front Line Awards were praising the nVidia GeForce 3 graphics card, Maya 4, and the “new” Titanium Powerbook G4.  It was also funny to notice an ad for the 2002 Game Developers Conference while wearing the freebie shirt I got from attending the 2002 Game Developers Conference.

lastly, I just want to mention that the Pragmatic Programmers’ iPhone SDK Development by Bill Dudney and Chris Adamson is a great book for getting up to speed on the basics of iPhone/iPad development using Apple’s iOS SDK.  I found it well written and the progression of topics well thought-out.  I also liked that the authors chose to be tutorial-level detailed with new topics, but as the reader progresses through the book, the authors leave the implementation of previously learned material to the reader.  It does the dual job of forcing the reader to actually learn what there doing and practice it, while also making the book itself more readable and hold more information (since they don’t have to reprint the same instructions over and over again, lots of space is saved).  so yeah, good book.  Great resource.  It’s been super helpful in getting me my first iPad gig.

Laters!

~R

Currently playing: World of Warcraft Trial Edition

I’m buckling down on the design for the iPhone version of Safari Sketch.  (If you haven’t played it yet, please check it out here!)  We want to support the Association of Zoos and Aquariums as much as we can with Safari Sketch, so I’m trying to get the iPhone version out as soon as possible.  Right now I’m looking at date of submission to Apple around the end of the month.  Much to do!

Tonight the task was to decide which of the features from the original I would keep, which I wouldn’t and what, if any, would be the new iPhone-specific features.  The following is the list as it stands right now.  If you’ve got an opinion or a suggestion so far, speak up now or . . . well you know the rest ; )

Feature List:

– Basic gameplay remains the same match-3 mechanic we all know and love.  Right now that part is running super smoothly on the iPhone and I’m very happy with the performance.

– I’ve decided to keep all the powerups, including the erasers that I originally thought I would do without.  If I took them out, I’d still want to reward the player for matching five.  Since the eraser is a good powerup for that, I just left it.

– After much self-debate, I’ve decided to keep the journals.  Tom‘s art is just too good to be left out.

– I’m going to strip the game down to a single game mode.  It will basically play like the old Relaxed mode, but with the art-unlocking aspect from the Safari mode.

– The main menu will be removed in favor of a jump-into-the-game approach.  Once the game loads it will immediately start the last level the user didn’t complete instead of forcing the user to go through two or three menus to get to the game.

– The pause menu will now contain the journal viewing option and the profile management menu.

– Some iPhone specific features I want to add:

• Toggle the option to ignore calls while playing
• Toggle the option to allow iPod playback while playing
• Set the big animal pictures as wallpapers for the iPhone

So all in all the iPhone version will retain much of the original Safari Sketch, streamlining it into a single relaxed game type and going directly to the action.  I think this will suit the iPhone user well, as it will allow them to pick up and play quickly and for short bouts.

~R

Currently playing: Jumping Bean, Rock Band, Prince of Persia