Blogs

The response to the October Challenge has been incredible! I think the one thing that’s most amazing about it: everybody gets it. Every appearance of it on the internet has encouraged a plethora of “I’m in!” or “It’s ON like Donkey Kong!” responses. I’ve had dozens of direct tweets and people hunt me down in IRC just to tell me how much they love the idea. Very awesome! For October 1st, I’ll be setting up and doing a new post on the Ludum Dare site, explaining how we can keep a list of finished games (i....

You might think I’m contractually obligated to start something ridiculous every few years, though I don’t remember signing the papers. My new project is awesome, I love it, but it’s going to take me all of next year (and maybe more) to make it. I’m so fascinated and taken by it, it’s something I NEED to make. But that’s next years agenda. This year, 2010, there’s still a good 3 months left....

One of the items on my seemingly infinite TODO list is to write an article about how to port an iPhone game to AppUp. Another item is to rework my blog layout and list all the actually useful content written here. I’ve yet to do either, but I think I have here a good compromise for the 1st. I do a-lot of emailing, and this past week I had a chat with a fellow developer who wanted some advice on porting his game....

Towlr recently frustrated attendees at “N Design”, an art-game exhibit in Curitiba, Brazil. Very cool! Here are some photos of the event. On your left, take note of the bright eye burning red Descriptions floating on the wall – Very classy Several other favorites were at the event, included a Rohrer game, a Terry Cavanagh game, and of course, Braid. More details can be found here....

Somewhere on my agenda is writing up some articles on how to port from iPhone to some of the other cool platforms out there (PC/AppUp, Palm, etc). I’m always rather busy though, when I finish one thing I’m often on to the next one. I have numerous developer friends I regularly chat with on IRC, Forums and e-mail, since we tend to be doing the same things with our games (porting, marketing, etc)....

Not much to say… okay, maybe there is, but I don’t want dwell on it. A random work in progress shot, showing the result of terrain generation, and an imported 3D model. No, this isn’t a game, just showing that I’m working with some 3D stuff right now. The dead red eyes of Blender’s stock monkey-head I’m back working on some Smiles stuff again right now, which I’ll post about in the coming days as I finish....

I actually finished on Sunday, but the final mobile port of Smiles is now sent. The port is for Samsung’s Bada mobile platform. I was pleasantly surprised how straight forward it was to get things up and running there. The system API is very much like a C++ version of Apple’s ObjC iPhoneOS API. The whole endeavor took no more than 4 days worth of work. Running in the simulator...

So finally, Smiles 1.1 for Netbooks (The Intel AppUp Center) has been submitted. Also, though Moblin Netbook Smiles was submitted last week, it came back with a very minor issue. That is now fixed, and sent as well. So Netbook Smiles == all done. Moblin 2.1 running on the USB key I have 1 last mobile port I’m doing, Samsung Bada. Again, Google wont let Canadians make Google Checkout Merchant accounts, so Android and NACL Smiles ports will be pending that, and a good motivator for each....

The latest in the seemingly endless stream of ports (the first of the two implied quicker ports I’m doing… though the 2nd one is sounding not so quick after all). The N900 is a Linux (Maemo) based device, so I was literally able to pick up where I finished the Moblin (Linux) ports. Admittedly, it was a bit of a scary port, since I was only initially able to get the game to do about 10 fps....

Commodore Like Realistic? Heck no! But totally awesome!...