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

In early October I started a new game project in conjunction with Chris Watts, a local game designer here in Melbourne. The game is called ‘Mole’.

It is a mining game where you play Mark the Mole and race against your air supply time limit to find gems and mine metals. Once you run out of air you have to get back to the surface where you can use your gems and metal to upgrade your various bits of equipment, (better air tanks means you can dig deeper to find the more valuable gems, better mining pick means you can dig faster and through harder types of earth, etc..)

It is built entirely in Unity3d, which is how we were able to build the prototype in just a couple of weeks.

We entered it into Muse Games Immunity Game Prototyping Competition. You can play the single-level prototype there, so go check it out! (and vote for us!)

While it would be great to win the Immunity Challenge, the biggest reason we put it out there is to get some early exposure to the users and see what their reaction to the game would be. So, go have a look at Mole (and the other Immunity entrants) and then leave a comment here, or post one to the immunity forums, or email me directly and let us know what you think!

Cheers!
-B

Since it is still early days here at the escapeFactory, I have continued to blog the Snowferno stuff over on the Snowferno site.. Ultimately everything will end up here, but for now, I will just drop a link to the post over there.

http://www.snowferno.com/2009/09/23/playhaven-unity-and-snowferno/

Basically outlines exactly what you need to do to get Unity to pop open a UIWebView over the game engine (with code). So if that is your thing, take a look!

Cheers!
-B

Hello and welcome to the escapeFactory development blog.

escapeFactory is a collaboration between a few composers, a few artists, a developer and a writer. We make games. This blog will hopefully be a fairly constant stream of interesting tidbits from our experiences in the game development world.

Check back often!

Cheers!
-Ben (the developer)