NimbleBit

Things are JAMMING here at NimbleBit HQ. All of our forces have assembled to form the Ultra NimbleBot.

A quick aside, here is a cool postmortem article from Cogs‘ creator Rob Jagnow of Lazy 8 Studios about indie game wrangling and lessons learned.

Onto the meat!

Doxygen is a neat tool that will take your source code as input and output nicely formatted HTML documentation. Ogre uses it and has really nice documentation. As Ian is currently helping out with Zero Gear, I decided it was time to generate proper docs for the game. The only problem is that docs aren’t being generated for a few random files. Does anyone know why this might be? I have EXTRACT_ALL selected in the settings…

Last week I continued the never ending journey of making the game run faster, smoother, and 10% more delicious. One quick thing I did that resulted in a smoother game was smoothing out the synced time between the server and client instead of just directing setting it upon syncronization. I like simple solutions like this! Still not perfect, but getting there. Also, I decided it was time to limit the server framerate (it was up to 3000 FPS at times!) to 200 FPS so it uses less CPU time.

This week I am down in sunny San Diego (and HOT compared to foggy SF) to work with Dave and Ian on Zero Gear. We are already making great progress and have a small LAN party planned for this weekend where we will do some testing. Should be fun!

Last week I finished up the graphics of my new Skate map, which in a fortunate turn of events has transformed into a great physical sandbox for all our kart physics testing needs. I have clocked in many miles over the last week constantly driving and tuning, driving and tuning - rinse and repeat. I have also been testing all the bug fixes coming through.

This week will be much more testing and driving and tuning (while battling a wicked cough / head cold). More Zero Gear is being played in the NimbleBit offices than ever before, certainly a good sign!

Last week I submitted updates to every one of our twitter enabled iPhone games, adding features that toggle tweet visibility to your followers and store a score tweet to send later when you’re offline. In other news, Moon Drop has been featured in the “What’s New” section of the App Store! We’re hoping this brings more attention to our newest NimbleGame.

Right now I’m up to my neck in Lua trying to help out with Zero Gear, wish me luck!