I just posted a lovely long piece on the Tin Man Games blog about our thoughts on Android, WP7 and Kindle, you should totally go and check it out:

and now a word about platforms

The Android marketplace (and the other Android compatible app stores) are all a bit different, and you are not required to have an account at the store to use your Android phone. This is a boon for some people who don’t ever need to buy stuff, or don’t want their credit card details on file somewhere, but it is a bane for the casual games on those devices. Adding that extra hurdle just to spend a few bucks on an app seems to take it’s toll in purchase numbers.

Cheers!
-B

Version 1.5 of iRaspberry is about to be released. It will include a change of title to ‘iRaspberry Lite’. The unlocked videos will increase from two to four.

We will also release a paid ($0.99 US) ‘iRaspberry Pro’ version with all videos unlocked.

UPDATE: iRaspberry Lite and iRaspberry Pro are now available!

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

iRaspberry has debuted and is achieving some great downloads, 12,000 in the first three days. We had a feeling it would do well once on the App store.

It is rating well in the Entertainment catagory, getting into the Top 10 amongst several stores (Italy, Germany, Mexico, Saudi Arabia).

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’s been a while since I’ve written a blog on what I’ve been up to. Mostly because I’ve been quite busy with all sorts of work. Thankfully the outcome of which is that I now have quite a deal of things to write about.

First to talk about are my efforts to materialize an indie game studio and to shape it into being an entity that is considered professional and not in fact an unemployed designers idea to create a job for himself.

For the last 6 weeks I’ve been attending a small business program called NEIS. NEIS is an abbreviation for New Enterprise Initiative Scheme. It’s an initiative created by the Australian federal government to help people form all walks of life to start their own small business. Whether it’s fashion, a bakery or game development. At the core of this course is you, the business hopeful sitting down and writing a detailed business plan.

This has been a fantastic experience for myself. While upon reflection it was ludicrous to go into the indie game development space without a viable business plan, I nonetheless started work on Mole last year without considering the games platform feasibility and target market. With these considerations now in mind for my new projects I know that the games I produce from here on in will be scrutinized for their financial feasibility on top of their creative merits.

The other benefit of completing NEIS is that starting from June onwards I’ll be receiving payment assistance from the government for a period of 12 months. It’s intended that I use this money to live on a baseline while I develop the games and products required to make the business self-sufficient.

Overall I’m glad that I took on the NEIS training and look forward to spending the next 12 months utilizing it’s provided resources to the fullest.

I can also say that April has really turned out to be the month of paperwork. Additionally to NEIS I submitted a funding proposal to Film Victoria for a slice of the Downloadable Games Intuitive funding pie.

From talking to those who follow the funding closely I know that Film Victoria has received dozens of applications over this round of funding. I know that competition will be high but I do nonetheless feel a sense of accomplishment over my application as I spent the time to not only explain the proposed game project itself. But to also explain how and why it can be financially viable. While my business plan doesn’t include the funding money to make my business viable, getting that funding will most definitely help my start-up to get working on a solid social-game project.

It’s interesting that both the NEIS and Film Victoria funding application came about the same time. I’ve used both to feed into each other. I hope my many hours of hard work with all this documentation pays off. I’ll find out the result of that application in July.

The last piece of news that I wanted to cover is that Mole – Quest for the Terracore gem will be going through a big art and content update very soon.

Working with Ben Britten, we want to basically reboot the release of Mole. Giving our customers and current users a free upgrade to further improve and impress reward customers.

There are a new slew of features coming to the 1.2 update of Mole. I’ll be writing up an official press release and announcement within the next couple of days. But to summarize what our customers will be receiving within he next few months:

• Rare collectables to be found.
• More medals to be earned.
• Power-ups!
• A brand new level.
• A completely redesigned menu and in-game GUI art style.
• Mole – Quest for the Terracore gem will be getting a name and icon change.

Stay turned for more information.

And that’s basically what’s been happening in the March and April period for me. With NEIS all but wrapped up and the funding application sent out I’ll be spending the next few months rolling out the update for Mole and some other upcoming stuff.

Until next time,

Chris Watts

Last week Ben and I returned from GDC2010 in San Francisco. It was a big few days – lots of talking, demonstrating, meeting, listening and socialising. While Ben was slaving over the FishTish table during the EXPO – I was meeting King of Kong – Steve Wiebe!

Thanks to Multimedia Victoria (ICT Trade Events and Exports Assistance Program) for assisting my attendance.

The escapeFactory leaderboards and website were down from 5:56:07 PM EST until 8:20:50 PM EST tonight, which is pretty crap.

What Happened

At 5:58 EST, I got an email from our webhost telling me we were using too much CPU. As they do on shared hosting, they immediately disabled (what they perceived to be) the offending script, which in our case was the entire API directory. Turns out, doing that kinda breaks the entire site.

Ben got a tip an hour into the downtime and emailed me. I missed both emails cuz I had just headed out to dinner and had my phone tucked away. I got back around 8 and restored the API directory which put the site back online immediately and resumed recording scores.

To be clear, this only affected the web server — all escapeFactory games are designed to work regardless of the reachability of our Leaderboard API. The apps themselves retain scores locally, but unfortunately all attempts to send scores up *to* our server during this time period failed and were not recorded. (More than likely it exposed some dummy code LOLcat usernames, too.)

Why Did It Break?

As of today, Mole is free for the week of GDC. In Lunarpages’ world, that made us a victim of a “Sudden Burst of Popularity“, which in turn exposed my (ahem) “Badly Written Script or Plugin”.

Every API call runs a SQL query that was only a little costly at 1000 records but an utter deal-breaker at 200,000 records. It was a junior mistake on my part, and one hidden deep that would have stayed hidden except for the sudden popularity of “Mole” today. An unnecessary subquery was causing our response time to slowly creep up over time. By the time I got to it, we were averaging over 5 seconds per API call. No wonder our CPU was topping out our limit. I refactored quickly and response time per call is happily back sailing under 0.03 seconds.

Going Forward

At this point, everything appears to be under control. The API as a whole is really efficient, and I think we bought ourselves some time having smoked out that rude subquery.

We’re clearly on the verge of outgrowing our little experimental phase where shared hosting stops making sense, which is frankly a great problem to have.

Hi everyone!

Chris here, Game Designer at Roo Games.

I’m happy to announce a new promotion for our first title. Mole – Quest for the Terracore gem!

This promotion is called “Mole is free at GDC!”

The game developers’ conference in San Francisco is a huge event in the video game industry. For indie developers like me it’s probably the most important for the whole year.

Because of this; Roo Games, in association with the indie games portal Esc Factory will be attending GDC in full and awesome force! We want everyone we meet to play our games. and as such; Mole – Quest for the Terracore gem! will be turned from a paid app to free starting from Friday the 5th right and finishing up on Sunday the 14th of March. Anyone with an iPhone or iPod touch can get  get a copy of Mole!

Mole has gotten over half a dozen reviews and has been rated on an average of around 4 out of 5 stars. While it’s proven to be a fun, unique iPhone game, not many have had the chance to play or even know anything about Mole. I want to spread the word and let anyone give Mole a go!

We’ll also be making another exciting announcement after the GDC about some new game play content updates in the pipeline for Mole!

Even if you’re not attending the GDC. I hope you’ll give Mole a go and as always don’t forget to tell us what you think about it!

Thanks for your time,

Chris Watts
Game Designer
Roo Games