Friday was the short day. Wednesday and Thursday we exhibited 10-6, where Friday was 10-3. Went back to the hotel and vegged that day, before heading back out to hang with the Fantastic Contraption guys. My neighbors were the Secret Exit guys. I ended up spending a bulk of the show goofing off with Tuukka, an artist on Zen Bound. The Secret Exit guys refer to him as the “prankster” of the bunch....
First day of exhibiting. I have to say, I’m exhausted. Feet ached, and limped a bit throughout the day, but I loved it. Here’s a few photos of the completed setup. And a little closer. I’m sharing a hotel with Phil Hassey of Galcon fame, and he had an amusing idea about creating some cheap signage. Hilighers and posterboard. At his booth he has a nicely done caracture of his goat Cuzco with a very supermarket-like sign advertising his sale....
Live from San Fransisco, it’s… me. As you may or may not have heard, I didn’t win. But that’s alright, I’m still here to exhibit. We’re sharing booth space with the IGF main competition entrants, which is great. That way, when people come to see the cool IGF games, they’ll find us too. Here’s my slice. Other cool stuff, Apple put up a page of us IGF Mobile entries. Very awesome....
I’m back. This time, I’m ready for GDC! Come take an early look at the madness I’m bringing with me to the conference. As you can probably guess from the lack of Smiles PC/HD progress posts, I will not be demoing it at the conference. I am still bringing both laptops though. The big one will be doing something else instead. Enjoy! 🙂...
The first step with Smiles was to up the art resolution. That way, I could cleanly resize to any resolution below 4x the iPhone (1920×1280). Unfortunately, double and quadruple iPhone res are not practical resolutions. Double iPhone will work windowed on most desktop LCD and 720p screens (960×640), and quadruple in a window fits on a 30″ Dell or Apple Cinema display, but we could do better. Also, not all screens are the same shape, but the solution isn’t too difficult....
Yet another series, but video. Part 1 of hopefully a few videos of me showing off my IGF preparations. Sinage, computers, etc. 3 weeks left and counting. A bit roughly put together, but that’s half the point. I didn’t want it to eat up that much time, though it did take me some time to remember how to edit and encode a video (without my software crashing). It’s no Goo Road to the IGF, but hey....
Alright, I don’t see a reason not to talk about this publicly. So if I’m a good boy, I’ll be walking through my process of up-scaling, converting, and porting Smiles as it happens. Ideally, I’d like to have the game available for all 3 desktop platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux). Quickly, Smiles is an IGF Mobile nominated collection of puzzle games for iPhone. You can learn more about the game at smiles-game....
Totally a tease. Click it if you dare! 🙂 (400k JPEG Version, 1 MB Lossless PNG Version) Rebuilt the texture atlas’ for the weather and vegetables tilesets, and resized the majority of the in game assets. 3x’d the iPhone res instead of 4x’d, as that would be far too huge. Art is large enough for 1080p, but the game needs numerous changes to properly support the new aspect ratio(s)....
Alright, so the clock says it’s Friday now. According to my whiteboard, that’s 29 days before I leave for the Game Developers Conference. Between now and then, I have a few commitments to take care of. Possibly a 2nd draft for my writing engagement, jury (selection?) duty, in addition to IGF preparations. It’s also an important turning point for Smiles as a product and a brand. Lets talk about that....
Sent off my draft over the weekend. Since then, I’ve been up to some biz stuff. Buying ad space on a few iPhone websites. I’m not sure it’s helping just yet, but hey, more exposure is more exposure. 🙂 148 Apps, Slide to Play, and one more site which I wont say because I paid for CPM (number of impressions as opposed to time). 😉 Last night and today I’ve been working at designing some business cards for myself....