A New Year, A New Direction When I wrote the previous post, motivation was still slumping and things were moving slowly due to the burnout caused by last year’s Dream Build Play crunch. With a chance to rest and re-energize over the holiday season, it’s nice to be able to talk with some zeal about where things are headed from here. Suffice it to say, I’m through with Xbox Live Indie Games. The 2011 fall dashboard update coupled with the horrific and all too frequent freezing of sales data, top downloads, and new release lists serves as a clear message that Microsoft simply doesn’t give a rat’s ass about XBLIG. Actions speak louder than words—what more needs to be said? I wish I had accepted this sooner rather than hoping Microsoft would finally wake up and see the potential of an iOS App Store-like ecosystem. Nevertheless, many things in life are better late than never. With that being said, my AppHub membership expired about a week ago and sadly won’t be renewed. It’s “sad” because Microsoft has squandered a golden opportunity to embrace the small-time indies out there who bring a hell of a lot of creativity to the table. But, that’s a discussion worthy of its own post and better left for another day. Where to from here? If the image at the top of this post wasn’t enough of a clue, the answer is Apple and their family of iOS platforms. Don’t worry—I’m not delusional and thinking that the grass is magically so much greener on iOS and infinite riches await. I’m fully aware that iOS is a very crowded market and as competitive as ever. Why iOS? Ideally, iOS appeals to me for a variety of reasons. iOS wouldn’t be what it is today if Apple hadn’t embraced the small guy. iOS was built around the one- and two-man teams, the bedroom coder, the solo designer or artist using Unity, etc. However, recently it has evolved to support even larger, more AAA-ish type efforts—and that’s a great thing! It proves that Apple has cultivated an ecosystem with a broad enough base that development efforts ranging from solo-dude on a shoestring budget to teams of 5+ with $100k+ budgets can be profitable. All of that speaks to Apple’s approach toward their App Store and ultimately, the developers who’ve made it what it is today. Simply put—Apple gets it. So, while the odds are great that I’ll simply be another small fish in a vast sea of competing apps and developers, it’s largely about moving to a generally great platform with a lot of potential still left in the tank. Practically, iOS appeals to me because it allows native code. I’ve been a C/C++ coder ever since my days in college in the mid-1990’s. After which, I spent a decade in the mainstream game industry coding in C++. Suffice it to say, I really like C++ and have always written my own engines and side projects in it. Thus, iOS is a natural fit in this regard since Objective-C/C++ seamlessly interfaces with C/C++. What about the move to PC from last year? I let Dream Build Play 2011 suck me back into XNA development—that’s how I ended up back in XNA Land.  Regardless, the PC will always be a target platform and XBLIG/XNA versus iOS/C++ really has no effect on that one way or the other. Unfortunately, targeting PC only is complicated by the fact that Steam acceptance is more or less a crap shoot. Where do things stand now? I tweeted a week or so ago that Slip Bit, LLC was approved by Apple as a company for iOS development. Prior to Christmas, I picked up a new Mac Mini and iPod Touch 4th Generation and spent Christmas break porting the codebase to iOS. Last but not least, Acoustic Encounters is back under development. Of course, the visuals are being dialed back and the complexity reduced—I’d like to post a bit more on this in the future and am hoping to post some screenshots in the next few weeks. New year’s resolutions for 2012: Ship a freakin’ game this year Try not to cry when it flops :) Post more frequently Try to avoid the end of the world
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A New Year, A New Direction

When I wrote the previous post, motivation was still slumping and things were moving slowly due to the burnout caused by last year’s Dream Build Play crunch. With a chance to rest and re-energize over the holiday season, it’s nice to be able to talk with some zeal about where things are headed from here. Suffice it to say, I’m through with Xbox Live Indie Games. The 2011 fall dashboard update coupled with the horrific and all too frequent freezing of sales data, top downloads, and new release lists serves as a clear message that Microsoft simply doesn’t give a rat’s ass about XBLIG. Actions speak louder than words—what more needs to be said?

I wish I had accepted this sooner rather than hoping Microsoft would finally wake up and see the potential of an iOS App Store-like ecosystem. Nevertheless, many things in life are better late than never. With that being said, my AppHub membership expired about a week ago and sadly won’t be renewed. It’s “sad” because Microsoft has squandered a golden opportunity to embrace the small-time indies out there who bring a hell of a lot of creativity to the table. But, that’s a discussion worthy of its own post and better left for another day.

Where to from here?

If the image at the top of this post wasn’t enough of a clue, the answer is Apple and their family of iOS platforms. Don’t worry—I’m not delusional and thinking that the grass is magically so much greener on iOS and infinite riches await. I’m fully aware that iOS is a very crowded market and as competitive as ever.

Why iOS?

Ideally, iOS appeals to me for a variety of reasons. iOS wouldn’t be what it is today if Apple hadn’t embraced the small guy. iOS was built around the one- and two-man teams, the bedroom coder, the solo designer or artist using Unity, etc. However, recently it has evolved to support even larger, more AAA-ish type efforts—and that’s a great thing! It proves that Apple has cultivated an ecosystem with a broad enough base that development efforts ranging from solo-dude on a shoestring budget to teams of 5+ with $100k+ budgets can be profitable. All of that speaks to Apple’s approach toward their App Store and ultimately, the developers who’ve made it what it is today. Simply put—Apple gets it. So, while the odds are great that I’ll simply be another small fish in a vast sea of competing apps and developers, it’s largely about moving to a generally great platform with a lot of potential still left in the tank.

Practically, iOS appeals to me because it allows native code. I’ve been a C/C++ coder ever since my days in college in the mid-1990’s. After which, I spent a decade in the mainstream game industry coding in C++. Suffice it to say, I really like C++ and have always written my own engines and side projects in it. Thus, iOS is a natural fit in this regard since Objective-C/C++ seamlessly interfaces with C/C++.

What about the move to PC from last year?

I let Dream Build Play 2011 suck me back into XNA development—that’s how I ended up back in XNA Land.  Regardless, the PC will always be a target platform and XBLIG/XNA versus iOS/C++ really has no effect on that one way or the other. Unfortunately, targeting PC only is complicated by the fact that Steam acceptance is more or less a crap shoot.

Where do things stand now?

I tweeted a week or so ago that Slip Bit, LLC was approved by Apple as a company for iOS development. Prior to Christmas, I picked up a new Mac Mini and iPod Touch 4th Generation and spent Christmas break porting the codebase to iOS. Last but not least, Acoustic Encounters is back under development. Of course, the visuals are being dialed back and the complexity reduced—I’d like to post a bit more on this in the future and am hoping to post some screenshots in the next few weeks.

New year’s resolutions for 2012:

  • Ship a freakin’ game this year
  • Try not to cry when it flops :)
  • Post more frequently
  • Try to avoid the end of the world

Fall Update

Things have been rather slow since the end of Dream Build Play and the subsequent postmortem. Admittedly, a variety of things have contributed to the slowness, but two in particular stand out. First, it’s fall (my favorite time of the year), which brings with it football season and all the mega-game releases. Second is the complete uncertainty surrounding the future of both XNA and XBLIG. I won’t say anymore other than I’m hopeful Microsoft will evolve XNA to support the next version of the Xbox. But I, along with a lot of other people, are having our doubts.

With that being said, I haven’t been coding much. Instead, I’ve been planning and designing some of the changes I’d like to make to the game going forward.

On the administrative side, I’ve renamed the company to Slip Bit. I think it’s a much more catchy and concise name. Along with the name change, I unified the various accounts (email, Twitter, YouTube, FeedBurner, etc.) that can be associated with a company. Thus, for the handful of people who actually subscribe to this feed, it will be moving to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SlipBit

Some people have been asking me if they could see more in-game footage of Acoustic Encounters. This is uncut and unedited footage of a start-to-finish play-through that was recorded directly from the Xbox 360. It shows off a subset of small enemies, a few mini-bosses, and a single big-boss. Acoustic Encounters was originally written in C# with XNA and intended for Xbox Live Indie Games.

Subversion Repository Stats...

I admit it—I’m a stats junkie. Almost anything that can be quantified, broken down, and categorized I usually find interesting. If it’s related to video games and/or coding—all the better.

After finishing up the Dream Build Play 2011 build, I took a few weeks off before diving back into things. The first thing I did after coming back was reorganize the project solution and rebuild the Subversion repository. The original repository had a bunch of bloated history related to libraries that I’d experimented with and never should have committed to the repository in the first place.

Since the repo rebuild, I’ve been backporting all the C#/XNA code to the C++/OpenGL engine and thought it would be interesting to see how the repository has evolved over time.

I discovered a great little tool called StatSVN, which generates a handful of interesting stats and charts for any Subversion repo you point it to. Thus, I’ve written a script that invokes StatSVN nightly and dumps the results to a subfolder in my public Dropbox folder. I figured I’d share the link (click the title of this post) for all the other stat junkies out there. I’ve also thrown up a permalink in the sidebar to the right. Enjoy.