NimbleBit

The fine developers (Rob Jagnow and Brendan Mauro) over at Lazy 8 Studios are releasing their debut game Cogs today!

If you like puzzle games I highly recommend it. You can buy it on Steam starting later today.

Most iPhone developers know that communication with Apple is most often a one way street. One can hardly blame them when the developers of all 30k-odd apps would love to email Apple and tell them how special their app is and why it deserves to be featured!

A regular day outside of Apple's offices.

While the prospect of Apple choosing your app to be featured in any capacity may seem statistically improbable, I’ve found out the hard way its always better to be prepared for it. When I was emailed a couple months ago by someone at Apple asking me for marketing materials I was grossly unprepared. I found myself hastily hitting Photoshop, my brow dripping with sweat, futilely attempting to create high resolution artwork from the low resolution art I had been developing with.
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Time for the 3rd installment of IKWYDLW! Exciting stuff! I also just read this great article comparing the games industry to the history of the print industry and how technology has put the power in the hand of small groups of graphic designers over time. It’s a good read - check it out.

Murphy:

I started last week implementing a new networking method. This involves simulating the client ahead of the server and then checking for errors and correcting. This includes predicting the movement of objects over a period of time. Predicting the movement of the kart is not an easy task (which is why we use a physics engine in the first place!) so I decided to get a ball character controller working (which is easy to predict) to test the networking method. Refactoring the code to support non-kart character controllers (any controllers!) took 4 full days of work but is going to pay off big time down the road. I also spent a night getting motion blur working (it looks AWESOME when boosting). I also got e-mail reporting of errors in the game thanks to Max from Unknown Worlds, Thanks Max!

This week I plan on getting the ball character controller finished (need to provide a better way to control it) and test the networking method a lot before moving forward with it. I also plan to improve the way the different camera controllers are managed so that we can swap character controllers on the fly.

marshmonkey:

Last week I started up my modeling for ZG again and started on a new track environment. It’s a giant “rats” style environment where you are in a scaled up room that makes all the characters appear tiny. Should be a lot of fun! Also have spent some time play testing Sky Burger. This week I am going to try and finish up the new environment enough to post a pretty screenshot!

eeenmachine:

Last week Sky Burger inched ever closer to a release candidate with minor bug fixes and new music. I also built an in game browser for our custom “NimbleStore” to browse our games which includes video youtube reviews and live twitter searches. Final touches on the game icon and attempts to thwart Marshmonkey’s attempts at cheating kept me busy over the weekend. This weekend I also added an unobtrusive news ticker to the main player menu to keep players up to date with NimbleBit news. Sky Burger will absolutely, no matter what, be submitted by this Thursday!

GEE DEE CEE. We came, we saw, we conquered. Well, not so much conquered as just walked around a lot for a week and met some really cool people and saw some really cool games. When we were deciding whether to go or not, we were torn about it - and in the end after getting discounted passes we decided to go. So is it worth it for an indie developer, particularly if that expo pass is going to be a decent chunk of your development change jar - and you have to book a flight and/or hotel?

First off, lets understand the potential costs. I will use mine as an example.

• -1 week of development time

• $350 for a summits and tutorials pass

• $130 for a round trip plane ticket

• $FREE accommodations on Brian’s couch

• $120 for food / drinks / transport / misc.

So, not accounting for the value of one week of development time, that’s about $600 out of the penny jar. Not much for someone with a steady stream of income but for a lot of indie developers that can be a serious chunk of the rent / groceries / development budget. We were even lucky enough to get our summit and tutorial passes for half off through a promotion for developers who entered the IGF, which was a huge savings for us.  So what did $600 get me?

1. A bit of knowledge. The IGS, along with chatting with other developers provided me with some insights. Here are just a few tidbits: Indie developers are hilarious. You should be prototyping every minute of the day, even while sleeping. Some interesting sales stats for different platforms, promotions are GOOD. If you don’t mind paperwork then you should move to Canada becuase they have entire branches of government devoted to showering you with money.
2. Some perspective. Meeting with a bunch of other developers, whether in similar situations as us or not provided me with some useful perspective on our own situation - and some other things that perhaps we should be considering.
3. Great company. It is quite an awakening for an indie dev who probably sits alone in their house every day banging away at a game to go somewhere and be surrounded by other like minded people. It is reassuring and energizing to realize there are a lot of other people who share some chunk of your passion for making games, and that many of them are going through the same experience as yourself. Meeting and being surrounded by all these people was probably the most valuable part of the expo for me.

So were those things worth $600? I would whole heartedly say yes, especially as someone who had never been to GDC. Even if I don’t make it every year, I am pretty sure I will make an effort to go every few years if just to keep in touch with so many awesome developers, and I would recommend the same to any indie developer who can afford it. Hopefully in the future there will be some sort of special pass for the IGS as the current price for the general summits and tutorials pass is a bit prohibitive for indies - and I am pretty sure I could not have afforded it if not for the discount.

Anyone else go to GDC this year? Do you think it is worth it?

pretty lights!

We went to the IGF and Developer Choice awards tonight, it was really entertaining and great to see developers accepting some much deserved and hard earned praise. The IGF was hosted by Andy Shatz who was great, and then the choice awards were hosted by Tim Schafer who was hilarious. It was also awesome to watch Little Big Planet clean up!