Happy April 1st! To start, my thing to make you laugh. I’ll be finishing this up in the coming weeks. I had to prioritize some stuff ahead of it due at the end March (another reason I’ve been so quiet post GDC). There was also a faux pas on my part, but nothing too big… I just have to drive down to the US border and activate a 2nd gen Kindle....
It’s mid-day Saturday. I’m on a plane in less than 20 hours bound for San Francisco, to join the celebration that is GDC (the Game Developer’s Conference). It’s a packed week for me. The past couple years I attended back-to-back Indie Game Summit talks on Monday+Tuesday, but this year I’m planning to jump around a bit more. My iPod touch calendar is filled with the most interesting talks that my Summits pass will let me in to, including some Wednesday->Friday....
2011 is here! The IGF finalists have been announced, CES is upon us, and GDC is less than 2 months away. I always have a hard time following up epic posts like the last one. So with this, my third attempt (ahem), I’m going to try to be more to the point: My plans for the year. First, the Mac App Store launches on Thursday… I wonder if Mike did something for that?...
The exact timing is a little off, but I today just renewed my business license. Yes, 5 years ago July I left my job as Technical Director at Big Blue Bubble (now one of Canada’s largest game studios … you’re welcome ;)). Here’s what I had to say. All systems are go! July 29th, 2005 – 10:34 PM Amazing. Today was my official last day at Big Blue Bubble. BBB was a great place to work, but I’m a too ambitious for my own good....
Added a toggle button for Windowed and Fullscreen today, and made it actually work. I also did some tweaking of the icons around the edge of the screen (pushed them higher, made the outlines more consistent). One of these days I need to align the outside UI stuffs to the edge of the screen The About/Credits screen icon is now a speech bubble (was a “?”, so not to confuse it with the help menu)....
I am a regular twitter user. I run a client (twhirl) in the corner of my right monitor, so for me it works like a weird combination of an IM client and RSS reader. A couple days ago, I caught glance of this request from Noel Llopis (developer of Flower Garden, Dr. Seuss’ Lorax Garden, and the upcoming Casey’s Contraptions). That’s a good question. As far as I know there’s no real “standard” achievement sound (unless you want to rip-off Microsoft)....
Alright, time to get back in to the routine. It’s been two weeks since the last post. Last week became an impromptu holiday for me — I am a Canadian living in Canada, but I deal mostly with US companies, so American Thanksgiving seemed safe. The week prior was busy though. I sent off the initial version of Smiles HD for the Mac App Store. It still sits in the approval queue, but I’m there....
For whatever reason, I was inspired to start playing with logo designs. There’s no new decisions to be seen here in this post, just some ideas I’m playing with (and rejecting). I actually used to make my own typography and font designs, one such example is this: You can see more examples of prior logos here. For the past 5 years I’ve been using this: I don’t know if I’ve ever really liked it, but it was good enough....
So I spent the evening getting Smiles working in 64bit Linux (Ubuntu 10.10) as well as the Mac. Here are the results: Smiles HD, 64bit binary running on ‘The Zotac’ – Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop And the Mac again: Smiles HD on the Mac again, this time in 64 bits And a closeup of the processes section: A zoom of the process, showing 64bit mode. The CPU usage is due to it being a debug build....
Before I get to the meat of this post, last night I finished my “early” Mac App Store TODO list. I *COULD* submit it now, but there’s a bug with submissions. My iPad version is called Smiles HD, and so will be the Mac App Store version. Right now the names conflict, so I have to wait until this is fixed. For now it’s “done”. I sent the binary to some friends to double-check compatibility....