I’ve been meaning to get this out for a little while now since GDC was 2 weeks ago now, but a whole bunch of things have gotten in the way. Alas I have finally found the time to do a small recap of GDC 2012.

To begin with, it was just lots of fun. Got to meet lots of new people again this year. Oddly enough a good majority of them were all from here in Toronto. Maybe we should do a GDC Toronto? And I was informed that I now have to start coming to TOJam and Hand Eye Society, so I’ll try to make some time to visit these in the future. It’s nice to see the sheer amount of support there is in Toronto for the indie community.

There was lots of boozing all week long of course, and I think Tim and I found our main watering hole at The Chieftan after everyone else would be heading home. The little pub was close enough to the hotel and the Moscone Center that it was a definite win. But San Francisco, you really need to do something about your air! Everyone morning after drinking I would wake up the worst sore dry throat. Maybe I just need to hook up some beer helmet contraption to slowly moisten my throat throughout the night while sleeping (note: don’t actually try this unless you want to try for a Darwin award).

I wasn’t a fan of the new location. Most of the talks were in the west building this year. It did seem better for flow of people, but it just didn’t have the same ‘pizazz’ for me because it just seemed like a bunch of big open warehouses to hold talks in. There was just something more intimate about having to walk through north and south more to get to all the talks. I think they had a lot more lines and overflow in north though, so I can understand the move to west.

I didn’t actually hit the show floor until Friday afternoon. I was far too busy trying to take in all the talks I could throughout the week. And after my visit to the show floor last year, I knew there wasn’t likely much more for me to see because I wasn’t looking for any sort of new products to integrate with, or services to use, etc. etc.. With that said, there were a couple cool things I noticed.

Adobe had an awesome little photobooth that would take your picture and send you a model of your face to use within your games. Talk about feeding into ones ego! Damn right I sat down and got my picture taken. Funny, but the guy wouldn’t let me sit and do multiple poses.
Unfortunately, I never seemed to receive my model. I’m very curious where in cyberspace it is now, and more importantly what I had to sign in order to get the portrait done cause they didn’t give me a copy or send one to my email. Who knows, maybe I’ll go for a trip to some other country some day and see my mug on a huge poster!

zspace had a super cool display of their 3d tablet drawing system. Put on the 3d glasses and you can now manipulate your scene in 3d space using a wacom like tablet and pen. Very impressed! I can definitely see some awesome uses for that.

NeuroSky was there again this year and had a headset that can read your brainwaves. They have an api that allows you to use the device through bluetooth on an android or ios device. And for $99 you better believe I picked myself up one! I don’t expect this will be extremely useful for me at all as a product right now, but it’s got tons of potential so I wanted to get one and see what kind of data I could get out of it and whether it might turn into something useful in the future. I’ll definitely have to go into more detail on this cause I’m really psyched to play with it, but that won’t be for a couple of months at least I expect. I’ll let you know when I start investigating things more.

And lastly, I liked the Game.Minder service that would give you reminders about upcoming games for companies that you want to be informed about. Basically it’s just another take at the app discoverability issue. I think the major issue for them will be getting everyone to use their app to get the updates. However, if they can get their app installed by default on android devices through a particular carrier for example, or become integrated into the ios sphere then I think they’d really have something! So good luck to them.

Other than all that it was talk after talk. I love knowledge, and so I find myself giddy trying to run from room to room to soak up the knowledge from each of the speakers. One of the best talks I sat in on would have to be Mike Acton’s talk on Data Driven Design the first day. He ripped on object oriented programming a fair bit throughout the talk in favour of general c practices and data oriented design. Let me tell you, it’s funny to see someone rage against something that a lot of people in the audience were taught to believe and hold so dearly. Everyone was up in arms trying to argue with him on points. Although I do agree with almost everything he said, because the statements were all correct in certain scenarios, I believe he takes things a little too far in general. c++ has many extras in its language that are all useful in certain scenarios. There’s no reason not to use those features in those scenarios. Unfortunately many people do not have a strong enough grasp of absolutely everything in the language and/or a strong highly abstract thought process to really see where the boundaries are for these scenarios. And so you see these language constructs used in all kinds of places they shouldn’t be. But one of his arguments was to not use operator overloads on something like a matrix class. I see no reason not to, and I’ll have to leave the reasons for another day. It was a great talk though and I think more people within high positions in the industry need to push ideas like these. Not because these ideas are right, but because you then get people to critically think about what they’re doing and when to use different ideas which is extremely important.

And also I have to give a thanks to RIM for a new free playbook that I got in one of their talks. If things look on the up and up for them when I get around to doing any porting of my current engine I’ll definitely give some good thought to porting to their platform since there’s a lack of apps there now, and first mover advantage is always helpful.

Once again, awesome GDC 2012. If you didn’t go this year then make sure you go next year so you can join in on the fun. I’m positive you won’t regret it.

Well it’s that time of year again when copious amounts of game developers all show up in one city to eat, sleep, and play games; that’s right it’s GDC 2012 in San Francisco time.

A friend (Tim McLennan, nothingness.ca) joined me and our trip didn’t start off too well since our plane was delayed about 5 hours due to a faulty parking break on the plane. On top of that I had recently gotten some kind of sinus infection that started with a big bump on my forehead and a puffy eye, and it was starting to puff up again. So I ended up passing out pretty quickly on the plane and slept almost the whole way there. It was kinda nice.

We got to our hotel, the Good Hotel, (seriously, it’s called the Good Hotel and they want you to know it!), and had a couple laughs cause of the decor. Everywhere around the hotel there’s a reference to ‘good.’ In fact we were sitting there talking and Tim noticed something and flicked the lights. Above the bed in glow-in-the-dark stickers was the phrase “good-night”. Also, above the bed are signs that say “Be Good.” Yep it’s everywhere, it’s kinda funny. I like the hotel though and the rooms were much bigger than i was expecting for the price we paid, at least they were bigger than the ones last year. But the downside… the area around has gotta be the sketchiest area EVER! It’s really not a safe area at all. Unfortunately for the hotel, I really wouldn’t suggest anyone to ever get a place in this area.

Saturday we took a walk down the street on a mission to find some pirate store. I was thinking I may need a pirate patch to cover my puffed up eye so it wouldn’t scare anyone away. Heh, if anything it would be a conversational eye patch, cause who doesn’t love a good pirate…arrrr. Well like I said, the whole area we were in was super sketchy and there’s people hitting up on the streets, but we managed to walk through and find the coolest pirate store called 626 Velencia. All proceeds go to language classes for kids as well so how could go wrong. Seriously check out this store! I was extremely impressed with the ‘authenticity’ of the place.

Today, Sunday, we register to get our GDC badges and get prepared for the awesomeness that’s gonna go down the rest of the week. I’m sure it’s gonna be an absolutely great week again, and I’m looking forward to tons of fun. If you see a guy with a pirate patch, that may just be me, so don’t forget to say ahoy matey.

When I first jumped into iOS development I obviously had to start using OSX. I hadn’t used a mac product before and wasn’t happy when I first moved over cause I had lost all productivity with my hands and my shortcuts. It sorta worked out that my main computer at the died on me so I was ‘stuck’ using my new macbook pro for absolutely everything – not just development. It took a while but I finally picked up the majority of the shortcuts so I could move around fluidly without having to touch that blasted mouse. In fact I’m able to quickly jump back and forth between Windows and OSX on a daily basis and instantly switch between which keys I press (even though I use the exactly same 101-keyboard type for both).

I still had problems with some of the shortcuts in XCode from an effective coding basis (like camelcase and fullword jumping) and thankfully I was able to change those around in XCode’s preferences. I think the most important shortcuts I changed were for page up/down and the home/end keys. It’s an automatic for me to jump around a file using home/end page up/down and the arrow keys and I was getting frustrated not being able to use them before. My key changes make me happy and more productive in XCode… but what about the rest of the system? I write a bunch of notes in TextEdit usually and I found lately I’m starting to get really frustrated when I go for that home/end key to jump around the line, only to find myself at the top/bottom of the document. Useless! A little bit of googlin’ and I find myself an answer – you can change your key bindings

So real quick just do the following:

mkdir ~/Library/KeyBindings
cd ~/Library/KeyBindings
touch DefaultKeyBinding.dict

Now edit the new DefaultKeyBinding.dict file and add the following:

{
    /* home */
    "\UF729"  = "moveToBeginningOfLine:";
    "$\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:";

    /* end */
    "\UF72B"  = "moveToEndOfLine:";
    "$\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";

    /* page up/down */
    "\UF72C"  = "pageUp:";
    "\UF72D"  = "pageDown:";
}

Restart any Cocoa apps (like TextEdit) if they’re open, and then presto! home/end keys work as expected. I can now jump to the beginning and end of the line with ease. It’s a small win, but I’ll take what I can get!

The past week I’ve had my hands deep in ‘build system’ land.  It’s been frustrating as hell!  The goal was to pull down the clang source and start hacking away at a quick plugin to see what’s possible and if I can transform the code tree automagically.  Boy was I off on the quick part.  One problem after another trying to get things to actually build.  Since things were so difficult for me I figured I’d share what I’ve learned in case it can help someone else. (Read more…)

I often read AltDevBlogADay and love the amount of great articles that are posted there!  Today Kristen Bornemann made a good post on the topic of game cloning.  She touched on a point that I find will be very important for the future and I think the cause of it is all because of the numbers game that we as humans are playing.  So I felt the need to gather a couple of thoughts and give an explanation of why I think it’s going to become more and  more of a reality, and that there’s really no point in fighting it, but instead try to be ahead of the curve and provide more than what others can.  Here was my response:
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Through the copious amounts of stuff that I’ve read about pricing over the past couple of years and the work I’ve done at school so far, I’d like to believe that I have a decent idea about what exactly the Freemium pricing model is all about and why it’s so hot right now.

I’ve obviously been trying to think about pricing strategies and where to place my games/products in the mix. I figured I’d write up some stuff on the different pricing models in general. … But since I’m no expert, and TechCrunch had a great post on the freemium model yesterday, I’ll just post this well placed link right here
(Read more…)