Wow. To say the last 3 weeks have been busy would be an understatement.
First of all, I ported Smiles to a new phone. The Samsung Omnia II, a Windows Mobile phone with a beautiful amoled screen and a custom GPU. Some photos.
What’s Windows without a Registry Editor
Some Avalanche… a little blury though.
Itz-a me! Zen in Italiano!
For those keeping score, the game unfortunately runs a little slow on the Omnia II. It’s definitely playable, but the GPU is no PowerVR SGX. I did what I could in the time I had, optimized my shaders and all that, but it’s what it is. I’ll post some videos later once I have more platforms to compare.
I’ll come back to this.
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Next is Ludum Dare 16, which was this past weekend. Amazingly, we got 121 entries this time, and it’s December!? Historically, December is always our slowest compo, but 121 is just 2 less than April.
Now, I don’t really know what happened, but 2009 has been an incredible year for Ludum Dare. In August of 2008 we ended the silly “constantly moving” game we’ve played over the years, and returned to LudumDare.com. Our entries for that and the next were average (I think 60-70 each, I’ll have to do some digging to get all the numbers). But 2009 hit and we’ve been setting records ever since.
I’d like to find some time before the new year to write up a proper retrospective of 2009. Voting ends January 3rd, so it’d be a fitting thing to have for then. We’ll see.
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But the crunch has only just begun.
Next on my agenda is to finish-up the Italian build of Smiles Drop. Yes, in case you didn’t notice, the Zen shot above is in Italian (but please ignore the word UNDO, k-thx-bye!). The Samsung ports I did for a contest held by Samsung. They wanted builds in both English and Italian, and I was able to deliver 3 of 4 (Zen and Drop standalone, no bundle). The Zen Italian build I finished and submitted 10 minutes before the deadline. If I had 2 more hours, I could have finished Drop too. Ah well. All that’s left is to fix is a couple lines of text that are too long, and to package it up.
After that, the crunch continues. I’d like to finish a Netbook version of Smiles by the 20th, or at least power through this features todo list I have in front of me. That’s the plan anyways.
After that, I guess I can take a few days off. 😉
So fun fun. Back to the grind.