Anything related to Soma Games itself as a company, group of people, or international man of intrigue.
Gavin and I (Gavin gets the glory though since it was his idea) are launching a new blog/news feature called Flurry Friday at Soma where we will share ideas to give our community a consistent update on what we are seeing as cool or useful in the game development world . The name Gavin…
We’re in the middle of a fantastic but unexpected experience. We were planning on running a promo for our iOS version of Bok Choy Boy with OpenFeint this week but due to some unforeseen complications we had to change horses at he last minute and we swapped G:Into The Rain into the slot. Even though…
I have about eight blog posts I wan to make coming out of the Intel Elements 2011 Conference, most of them positive. BUt one of these seems pretty time sensitive and I want to be part of the conversation out here so I’m going to do this now even if it’s only half baked. Whoever…
by Gavin Nichols The other day, Soren Johnsen posted a tweet that really caught my interest. He said “The next console generation will be won by whoever understands why the Xbox Indie Games Channel did not become the iOS App Store.’ This is true in so many ways. The iOS App store has enjoyed an…
One of the most exciting and powerful tools available to the indie developer today is Unity 3D (http://www.unity3D.com), a wildly popular game engine that exploded in popularity when the iPhone app store roared into public prominence. The Unity 3D engine has become so popular in part because of its ease of use, powerful tools, and…
I find myself (Chris) dealing with an ethical dilemma here at Soma Games as we get ready to launch Wind Up Robots. Should we include ads in the game as a way to help pay for the development costs – and hopefully keep Soma Games in business long enough to make another game or two?…
We are used to planning for disaster, disappointment, failure or bad news. How often do we prepare to celebrate? Celebration is such a critical part of business and company culture. Today we are celebrating our Code-Monkey’s title Bok Choy Boys game we made with A&A Global being featured by Apple’s New and Noteworthy section on the…
So if there’s one thing I’m learning in my career shift to “mobile developer,” it’s that computer programming is a science and that I’m not a scientist.
Previous thesis statement: memory is a magical unlimited resource. 200 mb webapp? No big deal – my desktop has plenty to spare. Zombie objects? Let ’em be, they’re not hurting any one.
New thesis statement: memory management stinks. Texture memory? Draw calls? GPU? Power of 2 Textures? This is starting to smell a lot like the low lands of computer science and less like the flowered fields of Scriptable Mesa in the land of GigaBytes O’Ram.
The premier entertainment electronics show in the world is going on as I write this and one of the feelings coming out of this year’s E3 is that it’s decidedly underwhelming. Dig this quote from a Wired article: “As the E3 Expo, the videogame industry’s annual bombastic show of force, begins anew Tuesday, it’s getting…
So were just wrapping up the 2011 MeeGo conference (#meegoconf) down here in San Francisco and we’ve seen some really cool stuff, heard some interesting news, and met some awesome people – but the first thing I want to write about is a bit of news I just heard from Tom Sperry of Exit Games.…