The iPad finally arrived in Australia this week. Some of us uber-geeks have had them for awhile now. (i got mine by calling my mom in the states and having her send one out for me, thanks mom!!)

(note, this is cross posted from benbritten.com)

Anyhow, it seems like everyone is showing off their clever and not-so-clever custom stands and cases for the iPad, so to day I figure I would throw mine in the ring) (plus it is sunday, and I don’t want to work right now)

When I first got the iPad, I had it propped up like how most of the stands work (ie like a picture frame sitting on your desk) However, this put it out past my mouse pad, and was a stretch to reach it. Since I mainly use the iPad to develop games, this solution was not ideal. (After about two hours of going back and forth between Unity, XCode and stretching to tap on the iPad, my shoulders were fooked)

Instead I needed something to get it closer to me. This meant getting it up above my mouse pad. This works well since the mousing area takes up a not insignificant amount of desk space, but not very much height. So I went scrounging in my big piles of junk. looking for a good solution.

Here is what I came up with:

This stand didn’t cost me a single cent. However, if you don’t have esoteric camera support gear lying about the house, then it might be a wee bit more expensive. (like, prohibitively so, maybe around $200)

You will need:

1 x Magic arm (Manfrotto makes them)

1 x Super Clamp (also by Manfrotto, altho there are plenty of other similar clamps that work just dandy)

You will also need some way to attach the magic arm to your desk (or in this case the shelf that is just above my desk. )

I have chosen the tried and true method of: find a clamp in the shed, and clamp the bastard to the shelf. However, if you are starting from scratch there are actually many better ways of doing this (for instance, maybe get two super clamps, and just use that. It would definitely look less terrible, but again, this was just what I had around the house)

The last thing you need is some spare bits of wood. I used a bit of 1×2 and some plywood.

The design is very simple, just a single cross piece screwed to the plywood (with a nice groove cut out where the charging cable fits) and a few bits on the back to give me some clamping options.

(note I am lifting the iPad so you can see the groove, it doesnt sit up like that)

(I find the top one give me lots more ‘reach’ with the arm, but is a bit wobbly. The center clamp point is more stable)

The stand works well in both portrait and landscape mode:

As you can see, it hovers right over the mouseing area. This means I can go from typing/mousing to iPad testing by just lifting my hand. Much more ergonomic! This is a perfect solution to keep the iPad in a useful position for coding and testing. At some point I might go out and spend the extra cash for a better mounting solution (either a mounting plate, or another super clamp)

Cheers!
-Ben

I am just playing around with making myself some groovy looking wallpapers and lockscreen backgrounds for my iPad and realized it is not as easy as just whacking up some 1024×768 image. There is the whole auto-rotating issue. In the end I decided to make a template, and I made it just a wee bit nicer so I could post it here.

Lovely isnt it?

The basic upshot is that for desktop wallpapers (the one that shows up behind your icons) your best bet is to make a 1024×1024 image and the center 768×768 is the area that will always be visible.

Here are some examples I took, to give you an idea:

It is important to note that the iPad overlays a gradient on top of your image (as well as icon shadows), so if you want to be color-perfect then you will want to take that into account.

As for the lockscreen, it is a slightly different beast since it has the overlay bars. In portrait, you have the same 768×768 ’safe’ area in the middle, but in landscape that is chopped down to a slightly thinner slice of image:

Thats it! have fun, make some cool wallpapers!

Cheers!
-Ben

Hey, my new book is out! (actually it has been out for a few weeks now, but I am just getting around to blogging about it )

Here is the amazon link:

http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-iPhone-Games-Development-Cabrera/dp/1430225998/

Anyhow, it is a really good book, even if you are not a beginner. Here is a snippet from the promo blurb about ‘what you will learn’:

• Efficient methods for drawing in 2D and 3D to the iPhone screen
• Game-specific animation techniques with Core Animation
• To use OpenGL ES for more complex and realistic gaming backgrounds and action
• Numerous ways to add music to enhance the gaming experience
• How to give your users access to their iPhone libraries from within games
• The tools and techniques of 3D audio for creating even more realistic gaming experiences
• How to do networking right, including two-player games over Bluetooth and multiplayer games over Wi-Fi

I wrote the chapters on OpenGL, so feel free to ask me any questions you might have about them )

Enjoy the book!
Cheers!
-B

It has been a very busy few months.

I started on “Mole – The Quest for the Terracore Gem” last october. Chris (the designer) and I worked hard on a prototype that we got out in about three weeks. We submitted that to the Muse games contest as well as the GDAA indie game contest at GCAP 2009.

Originally we were slated to do an iPhone release in mid December 2009, but since we got picked as a finalist for the GDAA Indie game contest, we decided to focus on polishing a desktop version that we could show off at the conference. This paid off huge in terms of really good gameplay additions as well as some invaluable data collected watching people play the game at GCAP. We took all of that information and updated the gameplay to make it even better and also spent a few weeks getting it running on the iPhone. After a good bit of external beta in mid January, we released it to the app store in early Feb.

Unfortunately somewhere in the final frenzy to get the game out the door one of the meta data files got overwritten with an older version. We built that into the version 1.0 release and pushed it to the store.

UNfortunately that little thing caused the game to go looking for some resources that no longer existed at the end of a level and was causing crashes. I hate crashes. As soon as we found out about the crashing bug we pulled the app from the store and pushed up a fixed binary. We had some great help from some of the touch arcade forum regulars who notified us of the bug right away, so thanks to them we were able to pull it so quickly and get the fix out straight away!

Although the initial app was approved in about 2 days, the fix took about a week to get through the process (still way faster than last year, so: yay Apple!).

In any case, Mole is out now, and we have had a great response to it.

Just a few weeks after I started dev on Mole, I was approached by Tin Man Games to take over the Gamebook Adventure development.

This turned out to be a much larger job than I had originally anticipated and it took about a month longer than we had hoped. However, the final product is really great. The time we spent to make sure the game was polished and performed well really paid off. There are a few bugs in this first release and we are working on a fix for them right now.
We have had some good press coverage for GA:

PocketGamer UK review
TouchArcade Review

Next up! We are looking to finish a handful smaller more casual titles that we have had in production for awhile now, SkateDude and BMXDude are at the top of this list as well as a couple new games called ‘Steam Pilot’ and ‘Gooey’ that I will post about later.

Cheers!
-Ben

Tin Man and I just finished making the teaser trailer for the upcoming Gamebook Adventure release: An Assassin in Orlandes. It is pretty cool, check it out:

Assassin in Orlandes is nearly finished, we are planning for an early January submission to the App Store, so look for it in mid to late January!

Cheers!
-B

Chris and I just got back from the Global Connect Asia Pacific game dev conference here in Melbourne. We entered Mole into the GDAA Independent Games Awards 2009 and got selected as one of the finalists.

As a GDAA finalist we were invited to put up a table and show off our game at the conference. Chris whipped up a few posters and I grabbed a couple of the stray laptops that I have laying around and we hit the expo.



GCAP is not a gamer expo, it is a game developer expo, so all the people there are somehow involved in the creation of games. Over the two day expo, we spoke to a zillion talented and creative people and they all played Mole, and let us know what they think.

The response was overwhelmingly positive. We had people coming back two and three times to just sit and play Mole during the downtimes. We had people who just sat down to have a quick look end up staying for 30 minutes trying to dig deeper and deeper.

Best of all however was the ability to watch people play the game. We spent a huge amount of time before the conference making sure that the core game play was solid and that the game was fun, and we were richly rewarded for that effort. However, watching people play the game highlighted the areas of the user interface that were lacking. It made apparent the places where we need to change the words on the menus or add new buttons. For instance, when you go to the upgrade shop from the end-of-dig scorecard, it is not at all obvious how to get back. Similarly, when people play it for the very first time, they run out of air and get back to the surface and don’t realize that they need to hit the ‘finish digging’ button to end the dig so they can start a new one. We even found a few gameplay bugs that we will iron out.

We are currently going through and tweaking all these little bits and pieces to try to hone the user experience before we release it to the app store. But we want people to play the game so I have put up the GCAP version online so that anyone can play it for free.

If you are into it: head over to the Mole page and hit the ‘play now’ link. You will need the Unity3d player, and you can get it from the game page.

We are planning on keeping the online version free to use, and we will be updating it alongside the iPhone version, so if you come back and notice some new tweaks here and there, that is why.

We love to hear what you have to say about the game, so send me an email, or leave a comment here!

More good news! A few weeks ago, I was approached by Tin Man Games to see if I was interested in helping them bring their GameBook Adventures to the iPhone. I am very happy to announce that earlier this week, I took over as the lead developer on the GameBook project.

The first two books are titled: “An Assassin in Orlandes” and ” The Siege of the Necromancer”.

If you like adventures and you can read, then you will like these gamebooks.

As a side note: Tin Man Games is running a promo right now that if they get a few hundred new twitter followers then they will make one of their games free on the AppStore. so go and follow @tinmangames.

(while you are at it, follow me too: @benbritten )

Cheers!
-Ben

Good news!

Our game: ‘Mole’ was picked as one of the nine finalists in this year’s Game Developer’s Association of Australia Indie Game Awards.

We will be showing it at the GCAP 2009 conference in Melbourne in just a few weeks.

We are pretty excited about this, however it does mean that the iPhone release probably will not be out by Xmas which was the plan had we not gotten into GCAP. We hope to get some great feedback on the game and gameplay during GCAP and be able to make the game even better, so it will be worth the wait.

If you haven’t already, you can play an early version of the game online, just go to the Mole page, and hit ‘play now’.

Cheers!
-Ben

Along with the book being released today, I am proud to announce three new Escape Factory titles coming soon to the iPhone and iPod Touch.

First on the list is ‘Mole’ which is a collaboration between myself and Chris Watts, a Melbourne based game designer. You can actually play (and vote!) on an early prototype version of Mole. Check out my earlier blog post about it. (update: mole now has its own page with screenshots, video and a playable prototype: The Mole Page)

Second and third are two follow ups from Snow Dude, where the dude tries his hand at a few more sports. This brings us Skate Dude, and BMX Dude. The new Dudes bring more challenges and more opportunities to earn points and pul off amazing tricks.

We will be posting more information as these games get closer to completion.

Cheers!
-B

A few months ago I got a random email from the guys at Apress. They had gotten my contact details from someone who had read some of the blog posts on my blog where I try to explain how to code some things up.

Well, I guess they liked what they read and they asked me to participate in a few iPhone development books.

The first of these is “iPhone Advanced Projects”, a compilation of useful iphone development stories from various professionals in the field.

My chapter is all about building particle systems in OpenGL, and there are other chapters covering a wide range of iPhone topics like utilizing wifi to talk with other iPhones, Cocoa Touch tips and tricks, GPS, porting non iPhone apps to the iPhone etc..

The whole book is great and if you are an iPhone developer of any level, you are sure to get good value out of it.

If you have any questions about my chapter specifically, do not hesitate to post here or email me directly: support@benbritten.com

Cheers!
-Ben