Archive for August, 2005

Roughing It

Saturday, August 13th, 2005

I was really tired last night, so I didn’t get anything done at all. It was Friday after a long week at the day job. So I sat down infront of the Redsox game and tried to at least make a bit of headway with some game design ideas.
I was completely unsuccessful. [...]

Game Design: A Drunken Review of Lux

Thursday, August 11th, 2005

Drunken Batman has a superb writeup on Lux, a Risk-like game that was originally developed on and for the Mac. It includes a raving review and a short history of the game’s life by the author, Dustin Sacks.
I love reading about shareware author’s success stories, especially Mac developers. This one is particularly special [...]

Game Design:
Random Name Generator and Other Story Tools

Wednesday, August 10th, 2005

I’m always looking for game ideas. Whether it be an entire game, or just a story plot point. These ideas can come from anywhere: an overheard conversation, a magazine article, a personal experience, etc. Sometimes this isn’t enough. Sometimes random computer generation can help when times are tough and ideas [...]

What Business Can Learn From Open Source

Tuesday, August 9th, 2005

Paul Grahm has written a terrific essay, “What Business Can Learn From Open Source”. He covers some great topics including productivity, employees, idea and business creation, and enjoyment (the most important of all).

Game Developers Conference Presentations

Sunday, August 7th, 2005

Watch streaming video (registration required) of some of the presentations from the 2005 Game Developer’s Conference.
Presentations include:

Age of Empires 3: Graphics Engine
Lessons from Viewtiful Joe: Making a Creatively and Financially Successful New Game
Will Wright discusses his new game creation called “Spore”
and more…

Mac Game Programming Links

Sunday, August 7th, 2005

This is a short list of valuable links for game programming for the Mac. If you know of any that I’ve missed, please leave a comment.
Game Programming on the Mac:

iDevGames Forums
Create Mac Games
Apple Games Reference Library

Objective-C & Cocoa Programming on the Mac:

CocoaDev Wiki
Cocoa Dev Central
Cocoa Builder
Mac Dev Center [O'Reilly Publishing]
Cocoa Literature List
Apple Cocoa Reference [...]

Mighty Mouse

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2005

Apple finally gives up on the idea that we only need a one button mouse. Of course, they can’t just give us two or more buttons, they give us none! Leave it to Apple to one-up everyone else. Even when they admit they were wrong.
The coolest thing is not the [...]

Distinctly Mac

Monday, August 1st, 2005

As I progress through my Game Plan for developing my first computer game, I’ve been keeping a journal of various game ideas. I recently reviewed what I had and noticed a trend: all were based on my past experience playing games. The listing included “cool features” from games on various platforms, but [...]