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…
We’re here at Intel Elements 2011, a “one year later” event from where we first heard Peter Biddle lay out a rather large vision for the Intel AppUp Center. Without going back into the history and our previous thoughts on AppUp I find myself feeling increasingly invested in this thing. Far more than getting tied…
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.