I’ve moved my active blogging about game development to my company’s blog to keep everything together. It’s become easier over time to maintain only one blog.

On that note, I just posted a small Bullfrog 2 development update and teaser screencast to share our progress. So, if you’re interested in following along, you may want to head over to the Outer Level Blog and subscribe to the news feed there.

The podcast features interviews with independent game developers, including:

• Positech Games (Starship Tycoon, Democracy, Kudos)
• Squashy Software (Platypus, Cletus Clay)
• Amaranth Games (Aveyond, Ahriman’s Prophecy)

It’s an interesting step-by-step review of the process of designing the Kudos game user interface. Cliff’s choices of color, style, and effects are all displayed in lovely time-lapse style.

This is a great overview of part of the game design process.

Today, Macworld has an article revealing much more detailed information. Sounds like there could be some interesting results when this technology becomes the mainstream.

More Details over on the company blog: Apple Hot Pick: Bullfrog

One person told me they saw a very popular MMORPG DOUBLE in frame rates in one particular scene because of multi-threaded OpenGL. We’re talking from 60 frames to 130 frames just in that one scene alone.

Tuncer goes on to mention that multi-threaded OpenGL will only be available on the new Mac Pro but may yet make it into Tiger 10.4.8. But, he then contradicts himself and says it may wait for Leopard.

Ah, the way of rumors.

I’m a bit puzzled as to what multi-threaded OpenGL means. Does this mean that it is now thread-safe? I thought it already was. Or does this mean it “automagically” takes advantage of additional cores and processors behind the scenes with no additional programmer work?

Either way, it will be interesting to see what kind of performance gains we will see.

Mark covers setting up SDL in Xcode, initializing OpenGL, and SDL event loops. He also provides the source code.

via: idevgames.com

It turns out that I’ve managed to help inspire him a bit to move forward with his own game development projects with a bit more energy.

To me it appears that he’s well on his way with some published source code of two simple games and 3 video tutorials.

Bravo!

“21-Days Later: Carlosvision”

Carlosvision – The Concept
Since 1998, the Editor-in-Chief of iDevGames, Carlos Camacho, has been tirelessly promoting gaming on the Macintosh platform, as well through building a strong community of indie Mac game developers. He now invites the community to show appreciation for these efforts by re-creating any game from the list below. The titles below represent his favorite 8-bit classic games from the ’80s, which he often finds himself yearning to play.

Arkanoid
Berzerk
Centipede
Donkey Kong Jr.
Earl Weaver Baseball
Empire Deluxe (turn-based strategic global-domination wargame)
Galaga or Galaxian
Joust
Jungle Hunt or Pitfall
Gauntlet
Gyruss
Lemmings
Miner 2049er
Missile Command
Moon Patrol
Mr. Do
Phoenix
Omega Race (by Midway)
Robotron: 2084
Zaxxon

Schedule:
Start: June 11, 2006 (11:59 PM GMT)
Application Deadline: June 25, 2006 (11:59 PM GMT)
Game Entry Deadline: July 2, 2006 (11:59 PM GMT)

The article covers the following four game engines:

• Torque Game Engine
• Torque Game Builder
• Unity Game Engine
• PTK Game Engine

The article is a nice overview of the covered game engines, but I was a bit disappointed that it doesn’t cover any of the free or open source alternatives. It does however provide a very nice clean high-level comparison of the engines in a table format.