Make Mac Games

I just took a look at the progress the other cup contenders are reporting. Wow! Are there some cool games being developed. Competition is heating up and everyone wins.
If you aren’t following along, check out this forum on iDevGames. Give people feedback, support mac game development.

This morning, Jordan Langille delivered his sketch for the Bullfrog application icon. He was able to create what I had in mind on his first try. Now, he’s working on turning the sketch into an actual application icon.

I set Jordan to work on the application icon first, because I felt having the icon to display [...]

After some really good feedback on the initial alpha release, I’ve made some minor changes that should improve game play quite a bit.
The main complaints:

bugs are too hard to hit
tongue recharges to slowly
frog’s movement is too [fast, jerky, jittery], i.e. low frame rates

Release Notes:

doubled the size of all the bugs so they are easier to [...]

I have an early playable build of Bullfrog now available for download.
Keep a few things in mind:

There’s still some missing functionality
Graphics are all temporary “developer’s” artwork.
Has only been tested on Mac OS X 10.4.2 and 10.4.3
Has not been performance tuned yet, but runs great on a Dual 2GHz G5 and okay on a 800Mhz Titanium [...]

The game is nearing the point where I’m ready to begin incorporating professionally designed artwork.
For this I’ve hired Jordan Langille of BuyIcons.com. Jordan comes highly recommended by Ian Jones.
I’ll be sure to keep you updated on our progress.

I’ve updated my project plan to reflect the work so far on Bullfrog.

via iDevGames:
So You Wanna Be A Pixel Artist?
There’s a whole bunch of good information on game art creation. I’ve added Zoggles to my Game Programming Links page for future reference.

More updates on the game development front. The game is turning out to be pretty fun and challenging. With the new bug types, it makes it very challenging to predict the bugs movement. I have a few more bug type ideas that I’ll be experimenting with that could prove to be quite [...]

More game development progress updates:

Water has been added (though it doesn’t affect game play yet)
The frog’s tongue now has a recharge rate, so you can’t simply hold down the attack key
Tongue Attack ready indicator via the tongue tip gets drawn
Score Board keeps track of bugs, rounds, and time
Frame Rate display
Game Over and Round Over messages [...]

There’s a nice discussion about the progress people are making on their OMG Contest entries over on iDevGames. Competition looks stiff — pretty intimidating.
Anyway, here’s a list of some of the developer’s journals that I found:

Super Transball 2 [Brain Games]
Tractor Beam [Will Thimbleby]
Nanobot [Ghost Software]
Tempest [New Dawn Games]
Chemical Bonds [Malarkey Software]
Crazy Race [Penguin Productions]

If [...]