Roaming Gamer » Projects

First Game Released – Something Blue!

edo — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 06:08:02 +0000

My first iPhone/iPod game has been accepted and is now for sale on the iTunes store. As you might expect, I'm happy and a little excited about this. If I sell at least one copy of this game, then I can finally label myself a 'professional' game developer. This is yet another goal I can check off my list:

Working For Self [i.e. quit the day job] - Not yet, ... sigh
Professional Game Developer - (Update: It's official, I've made a sale and I'm in the club...)
Professional Non-Fiction Writer - Check!
Professional Fiction Writer - Not yet, but this is on the list...
... sure there are more, but that's not what this post is about.

If you read my prior posts (1,2) about this game, then you may wonder why I'm selling it instead of giving it away for free. Well, I thought long and hard about this and I realized that, yes, the core mechanic is borrowed, but I have elaborated on this mechanic by adding new block types with various interesting behaviors. So, I went with the lowest priced tier ($0.99) and left it at that.

Of course, I am giving away a few free copies to my readers. If you have a iPhone or iPod and want to give my game a try, please use one of these codes:

L943F6YEATLM
MMJLW7H7PHEY
LMJH69RPKMRN
W4NJ7JJYRELM
J7L3ATN4HL9T

Thanks for reading and to those who supported me and gave feedback in during this effort I give a special "Thank You!"

-edo

Digging In The Graveyard

edo — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 02:35:15 +0000

Over the last 29 years, I have worked on many, many projects that did not come to fruition. For most of that time I didn't make any special effort to retain my unfinished work.

In this respect , I think perhaps I was like many hobbyists (and Indies.) I flitted from idea to idea, playing around until it wasn't fun any more. Most of these projects still live on as forgotten files on dusty old hard-drives I keep in a pile in my office closet.

Relatively recently (starting in about 2002) I began retaining every unfinished project. I created a repository for these dead and dieing projects on my data drive in a directory simply labeled 'graveyard'. After that, every time I wrote a piece of code, made a piece of art, or created a document and then failed to use it, the entire project got moved to 'The Graveyard'.

Today, the graveyard contains hundreds (maybe thousands) of unfinished projects, unused assets, and various other pieces of cruft. In total about 200GB of files (mostly compressed) are buried there.

As the title of this blog implies, I've started to dig through this content. Perhaps, the only result will be a bit of reminiscing, but my goal is to find things that meet the following criteria:

Finish-able projects - I hope to find something that can be polished off and put to use. (A lot of these projects are pretty functional, but were abandoned for lack of time, art, interest, etc.)
Inspiring - I am also looking for inspiration. Perhaps a project will be too out-of-date to be useful in its current form, but still be good enough to inspire a 'remake'.

Like I said above, I can't be unique in my failure to finish projects, but I wonder how many other folks out there keep all their unfinished work. I also wonder, for those that do keep stuff, how they organize it.

So, if you are reading this and you do retain unfinished projects, please comment and tell me about your system. I'd love to find a better way of organizing this crud. My method is pretty ad hoc, mostly direct copies followed by a compress.

TD Research – Looking More Like a Game

edo — Thu, 20 May 2010 06:37:05 +0000

Its getting to be time to hit the sack, but I figured I'd post another screencast of my progress. This time I'm using Jing (as the less ugly watermark shows) which ain't bad for a free tool. Oh, and before anyone says so, I know the current TD is very geoDefense like. I blame the fact that I've been playing a lot of geoDefense and GD Swarm (both very good games which you should get if you have an iPhone/iPod/iPad, and if you like TD games). Alright, nuff said for now.

-ed out

TD Research – Added Path Graphic; Testing ScreenFlow

edo — Wed, 19 May 2010 06:58:22 +0000

Here is another short screencast showing a slight update from yesterday. I modified the paths to be linear and added a path graphic to show them. Note: I spent some time tracking down a 'bug' in iTGB today so I didn't make much progress. I filed it, but FYI, objects on a linear path require 'UsesPhysics=1', while bezier and catmull don't care. I should have figured it out right away, but I was a bit distracted.

Anyways, without further ado, here is the second screencast (with an ugly water mark, but hey, it's a demo):

Click here to view the embedded video.