New year's resolutions, and going indie!

Alright, time for another blog rant.

My professional carer as an casual iPhone game developer has taken it's course and actually ended right before christmas. The  last 6 months was spent in Vancouver, Canada which was my first move to another country. The studio I worked at called Deadbug, shipped 5 apps in total, 4 of them is completely programmed by me alone. As time progressed, the games became gradually more casual and although overall quality increased, gameplay became gradually dumbed down (in my opinion), so after roughly 3 years of full time employment I decided it was time to switch things up a little!

Now with 3 years working with Unity Iv'e grown extremely close with the engine :)
I've put together a big framework (still being developed and added to) that's growing by the day.
It's feature set includes:

* Complete Sprite system
* Full of math, vector math, point (voxel) and geometric extensions
* Complete Xml classes with serialization capabilities that can be used for automatic game save & load functionality for example.
* Extended debug drawing functions
* Object pooling
* Particle system pooling (perfect for one-shot effects)
* Audio management for one-shot sound effects (includes a basic realtime mixer, random pitch shift and pooling of course)
* Tween classes for simple animations
* A global variable database for sharing global values and easy live tweaking
* A "pixel converter" that easily converts between world and screen units (fast) for orthographic cameras, includes screen anchoring methods and aspect ratio related stuff.
* Input extension classes
* A great set of extending classes to build upon
And more!

Some features are more complete than others, but are getting incrementally improved, and Im quite confident it will grow into something shareable at some point.

There is also the vastly improved tile engine, but that's not really part of the core framework.
Im looking forward to showcasing all of these in the feature, because now that I am unemployed, I suddenly have massive amounts of time being put into all these things.
Although they probably will appear in a game before anything else (like the asset store).


There, now that we got all the personal stuff out of the way we can get down to business. As the title of this post states, I have decided to go completely independent, making games from my bedroom essentially. I have given myself one year to this endeavor, but might extend that time period depending on if I can acquire help in the graphics department.

This has to be the end of the rant - until next time I feel like clearing my head :)

Moving on

 (NOTE: I am no longer working for the company Deadbug)

Wow, it's been such a long time since I've touched this blog.

But I will try to make new efforts in keeping it alive with new insights on my discoveries on game programming and also what is new since last time is that I delved into the world of music production, so I will probably throw up a few links to some tunes later on and maybe even write about sound design in correlation with games!

So now this blog is focused on both games and music, the two things i love the most.

Back to topic - since last time I wrote I have graduated from my school, got a job, and on that job released a full game for the iPhone / iPod Touch. The company I started working on is called Deadbug (www.deadbug.net, facebook group) and the game we released is called Attack of the Titans.

Deadbug actually only consists of two guys including myself, the other one being the founder, Chris from Canada. So we're definitely what you would call a indie studio :P

I am the guy who does the programming (obviously) and comes with a lot of good game design ideas and concepts (being that I've played so many games since I was little I get a lot of inspiration and ways to improve game mechanics). Chris is the graphical artist and project manager. It's a really awesome setup we've got going, being so few people working together is so much fun and you get be apart of just about every decision about the games you make. Of course, we only make quite casual games right now, but we have some cooler ideas for the future.

Attack of the Titans is a small tower defense game, the first one Deadbug ever made and the first game I ever worked on that got officially released in a store (that being the App store). It's not the best game out there, also there where a lot of things we learned a long the way making it; so would we make a similar game again it come out so much better. That being said, the games I've played on the App store are usually crap, either made for idiots - or - without any thought or compelling gameplay. And since it's so incredible hard to get noticed on the app store, we don't think our game got the attention it deserves. Anyway we are on are way with new titles as we speak and hope to get some purchases from those so we can keep on going as a studio and also keep on making games!

So all that being said, I will still have my personal stuff that I will be writing about here. Hopefully there will be some interesting articles, interesting applications, short tutorials, code snippets / libraries, maybe even a few tunes made by me - so stay tuned!