NimbleBit

GDC: North Hall

At this point we are running mostly on free energy drinks(*) given to us by strangers on the street and the desire to see cool stuff.

* As a side note, somebody just stole my energy drink off the table when I wasn’t looking. Not cool.

Tuesday Dave was at the second half of the Indie Game Summit while I was getting my brain filled with fluid dynamics, massively parallel GPU physics, and networked physics. Some of the highlights of day 2 of the IGS included:

The indie game maker rant where a bunch of indie developers each got 5 mins to talk about whatever they wanted.

10 ways to market an indie game from 2D Boy and Polytron.

The 4 hour game design from Cactus in which he gave some tips on how to rapidly create games.

Making web games: The indie experience from Pixeljam.

We got the Tutorial and Summit pass to GDC. The events for that pass are basically over. Starting Wednesday, we have been checking out the IGF finalists and booths.

We have played most of the IGF games now. Some of the ones we enjoyed a lot are Cletus Clay, Retro/Grade, Osmos, Cortex Command, The Maw, Galcon, and IncrediBots. Some of these games are available, others will be available soon. You should definitely seek them out!

The rest of the schedule for Wednesday includes more booths and probably another visit to the IGF pavilion followed by the IGF Awards(!!!) and then possibly the Developer Choice awards.

Exciting stuff!

We are going to try to post updates about our adventures at GDC on the blog and twitter.

Dave flew in on Sunday and we worked on a bit of Zero Gear polish before going over to the convention center to preregister for GDC. After that we headed out to a big indie dev Indian dinner that the fine folks at Flashbang hosted. In honor of their 6th birthday as a company, they bought the entire group of people dinner and gave everyone a free shirt! Very cool of them!!

The dinner was pretty crazy. We talked to such fine developers as Flashbang, Ian Dallas of Unfinished Swan fame, Ron Carmel of 2D Boy, John and Phillip of Wolfire, a bunch of guys from Intuition Games, David Carrigg of Burst, and a bunch of people from TunaSnax.

And that is only about 10% of all the indie devs in attendance.

Here is a shot of our passes and the shirt we got from Flashbang:

GDC Passes and Flashbang shirt

One of the things we are going to do with our shiny new blog is post a run-down each week of what we have been working on, and what we are planning to get to work on next. Here is our first installment:

Murphy:

The week started with the Sea Mine being added back into the game. The twister, punching glove, and LUVBot still need to be added. Fixed an issue with free cam mouse movement. Made it so sleeping physical object’s can choose to not update over the net. Refactored the game mode scripting a bit. Continued work to locate an issue related to scheduling of threads/processes (client + server are running on the same core for some reason). And at the end of the week, I threaded the physics system with… mixed results.

marshmonkey:

This week I spent finishing some graphics for Sky Burger, some of the interface screens as well as refining the background buildings which had a few problems with perspective and improving the readability of the ingredients. I also spent some time getting the forums all sorted out and tweaking some issues with the web site. For Zero Gear, I spent a day getting a new level set up to test a new element that is being worked into the game.

eeenmachine:

The beginning of this week started with the madness of trying to give away 200 promo codes to NimbleBit games. Safe to say I didn’t get much development work done. Since Monday though, I’ve really gotten in a groove and gotten Sky Burger 90% of the way to beta. We banged out an awesome preview trailer, and added sounds, UI enhancements, plenty of optimizations, and today am adding burger resume support, touch controls, and worldwide stats.

Networked Physics

Zero Gear is a multiplayer physics game at the core. So a lot of my effort is spent in networking. More specifically, synchronizing the physics over the network. I’ll admit this was one area where I was very naive when starting the project.

“Oh yeah, it will be a snap. Just run the physics on the server and update the clients. It will take me an hour and then we can go get a burrito to celebrate.” 

Here we are a year later and I still don’t have my delicious celebration burrito…

Read the rest of this entry »

YouTube Link

Many die-hard NimbleBit fans might already know me as David’s brother eeenmachine. For those that don’t, I’m David’s twin brother and good friend of Brian. I’ve been doing independent iPhone game development for about 6 months now and decided it was time I joined forces with NimbleBit to make some properly awesome games. NimbleBit will have a presence on the iTunes App Store as soon as the paperwork goes through! Watch the trailer below and go to the games page to check out the games joining the NimbleBit family.

I’m excited to bring the enthusiastic Zero Gear community together with some passionate iPhone gaming fans. To celebrate, we’re going to be giving away almost 200 promo codes starting Monday, March 16, redeemable for free copies of our iPhone games! These codes will be posted throughout each day on our twitter, forums, and chat. Register for an account and get ready for some free iPhone games!