Make Mac Games

I’ve been very busy with the new day job. It’s really taken a huge chunk of my time. Fortunately I’ve been able to eek out enough time to finally ready a new build of Bullfrog.
This past week of heads down game programming has produced the following changes for this new release:

heavy bug animation optimization
added [...]

A new version of Bullfrog is now available with tons of enhancements. Though a majority of the work went into the refactoring of the cocoa and objective-c code.
These were important changes that allow for adding new bugs in future versions. It also allows me to move away from procedurally built levels to designed levels [...]

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.

Carlos Camacho, owner and editor of the Mac game developers’ site iDevGames and application developer’s site iDevApps, has posted a nice bit on blogging about Mac programming. He points out two great blogs on general mac programming I have not seen before and gives Make Mac Games a nice little plug.
He also requests that [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Yesterday, I discovered a serious flaw in the design of Bullfrog.
I’ve been developing this game on a PowerMac Dual 2GHz G5 with 1 GB RAM. The game was designed to run at approximately 60 frames per second. The animation was smooth and all the game objects moved at their correct speeds.
Last night, I [...]