We’ve just released Battle Group on four platforms simultaneously. Porting is usually a lengthy process that I hate to do. I quit my job in the mainstream video game industry partly over being forced into porting one of our latest games. Thankfully this is not the case when porting with Unity as the time required is measured in days rather than weeks or months. Today I’ll share my experiences porting Battle Group with Unity.
I’m sick at the moment which has forced me to stop working while I rest and recover. At times like this I find myself becoming retrospective and looking at how things are going in my game development life. I thought I’d share my thoughts on where I think things are going well (and not so well) for game development in 2011.
I attended Freeplay Independent Games Festival on the weekend and had a chance to try out Antichamber for a little over an hour (sorry to all the people in the queue behind me). We were there to show off Battle Group as we were a finalist in their indie game competition. Part of my discussion with Alex was about our when our respective games would be “finished”. Today I’m going to explore this a little further.
I spent last week at GDC and 1.5 days of that in Game Connection. I was taking prototypes Bane Games’ next games to show publishers to see if we could get a funding or publishing deal for them. Today’s article is my thoughts about Game Connection and whether other Indie’s should go next year.
The SOLID principles are a set of 5 software development principles coined by “Uncle Bob” (Robert C. Martin). They are a set of guidelines for Object Oriented Design (OOD), specifically for class design. They are widely used by agile business programmers however they are generally unknown amongst game developers. This article describes the principles and frames them in common game development situations.
Since the release of Flick Buddies, I’ve been prototyping game ideas for our next game. The best of these prototypes we’re taking to GDC to show publishers. Today I’m sharing my list of tips for creating prototypes.
Now that I’m officially a full-time indie game developer, for the first time in my life I am working from home full-time on games. Many of my game developer friends have also started working full-time from home in the past few months, partly because of all the game studios shutting down in our city recently. Working from home has its own set of unique challenges that aren’t initially obvious. Today’s entry is a list of tips I use to be as productive as I can while striking a good work-life balance.
Many people know I think Company of Heroes is the greatest RTS of all time. Today I found out that Company of Heroes Online (CoHO), the free to play spin-off from the CoH series is shutting down. This made me irrationally sad, considering it’s “just a computer game”. I’ve been playing CoHO for at least an hour per day for the past few months and loving it. The main differences between CoH and CoHO are in the MMO style commander that you level up over time to receive new abilities you can use in battle. There is a lot of misinformation around on the internet and after my last successful “Facts, Verdict, Solution”, I thought I’d do one for Company of Heroes Online:
I hear a lot of game developers refusing to use Unity for web games because of penetration. David Edery made a point of discussing this during his keynote at GCAP last year. Today I’ve decided to formulate my thoughts on why I disagree with this argument and why I think you should be using Unity.
I build software. The best place to find me is on 