Crawling out of bed early this morning, I made the weird decision that it’d be a blogging morning. It seems I’ve stockpiled a few interesting things to talk about. I’m nearly ready to start talking about the new project too, but as the title suggests, I’ll be talking about the other stuff today.
First thing on the agenda, Ludum Dare. I wanted to follow up that prior post of mine with a brief finale post. Wednesday night I flipped the switch and revealed the results to Ludum Dare 14, our biggest competition yet. Amazingly, we missed only 2 entries the night of the competition. So the final total was 123 entries. Wow!
Rather than repeat all the subtle details, you can check out my news post on the ludumdare.com. Notable extras include 18 time-lapse videos, 2 of those being fully produced episodes of an internet video show by one of our regulars/admins. It’s very cool to see what interesting ways our community and event have evolved over the past 7 years.
Ludum Dare got a mention on Game Set Watch. Also a few entries were noted on IndieGames.com, and via a syndicated article on Gamasutra.
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Next on the agenda, book. I hinted at this earlier in the year. On and off over the past few months, I wrote a chapter for an iPhone Game Development book. I sent what might be my final edits about a week ago, so I might be done now. Before spilling the beans about the project, I wanted to see the book on Amazon first.
And… well… guess what?
The book is a collection of articles written by iPhone game developers. It’s almost like a Game Programming Gems for iPhone, with 10 articles in total.
The book has an interesting motif. It’s written from the perspective of “Hey, I’m an iPhone game developer, and I made this game. Here’s something interesting I did in my game, and how I did it”.
I’m not sure I can say what the other authors wrote, but I will say I wrote a chapter on portability. I’ve mentioned here a few times already, but Smiles was developed mostly on Windows. I built a custom library that wrapped SDL+OpenGL for PC/Linux ports, and iPhone OS+OpenGL ES for the iPhone port. In my chapter I walk through some pros/cons of working portably, and talk about what and how you need to work in order for the code to be easily portable. I finish off with a neat little physics demo-game that’ll compile and run on any SDL supported platform, and the iPhone (native iPhone code, not the SDL port).
I’ll have more to say about my thoughts on the writing process another time. I want to hold a finished printed copy of the book in my hand first. 🙂
(Note: Add “Author” to credentials)
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Finally, Gavin Bowman (one of my twitter cohorts) started a feature for The Apple Blog called The App Store Round-table. There’s a group of iPhone developers commenting on subjects on a mailing list, and Gavin assembles an article with notable quips from that discussion. Anyways, things I’ve said have come up twice. 😉
– Transparency and the Approval System
Both comments are actually from a response back when he pitched us the idea a few months ago, so maybe they’re not the most up to date (yet). Still, I think it’s a neat project to be involved in. Plus The iPhone Blog spoke highly of Smiles, which is always an easy to make me like you. 😀
That’s it for now. I have a little more work I’d like to do on “the new project” before I start spilling all the details. Until then.