Make Mac Games

I just rediscovered this nice little podcast: Indie Game Developer’s Podcast

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)

One of the more interesting things about releasing software is tracking how people find your software and how many people download and use the product.

Since I first released the Alpha version of Bullfrog back in October 2005, I’ve been tracking approximate download and referral statistics. I finally got around to actually putting all these numbers together with some nice tables and charts with a nice little summary about what everything means.

So if you are at all curious as to how well Bullfrog did in downloads and who turned out to be the best referrer of traffic check out my Bullfrog Download Statistics article on my Outer Level company blog.

Cliff Harris, Positech Games, has published a design post-mortem of his latest game: Kudos.

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.

Bullfrog 1.2.0 is out.

I’m pretty excited about this release. There are bunch of cool new things in this version:

• Automatic Software Updates using Andy Matuschak’s awesome Sparkle Framework
• Online High Scores
• Pause Button
• Screen Shot Button
• Several bug fixes

Download Bullfrog 1.2.0 for Free

Kristie Masuda from Spymac published a nice little review of Bullfrog last Friday.

More Info on Outer Level Blog

Yesterday, I mentioned the possibility of a multithreaded version of OpenGL coming to Mac OS X.

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

Apple has just listed my game, Bullfrog, as a Hot Pick and Featured Download.

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

Tuncer Denis of InsideMacGames.com has an interesting post on his blog speculating that Apple is readying an update to OpenGL that will bring up to a reportedly 2x performance boost.

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.

Finally, I’ve gotten around to actually submitting Bullfrog to some of the download sites.

The first site I’ve submitted to is MacGameFiles.com.

I’ve decided to spread the submissions out a bit to both make sure my server can handle the additional load and to get a feel as to which sites bring the most traffic.

I’ll try and put together a graph to give a breakdown of traffic before and after each submission.

You can find the new listing here: http://www.macgamefiles.com/detail.php?item=19259

This entry has also been posted to the Outer Level Blog

MacNN.com reports:

TransGaming today released the “Cider” portability engine for Intel-based Macs, offering game developers and publishers the ability to deploy Windows-based games on new Macs quickly and easily, without the need for traditional arduous porting.

This sounds interesting, but “Cider” uses a Windows compatibility library to allow this to work. I wonder what the performance hit, if any, will be. This could be the answer to bringing more AAA games to the Mac on a more resonable schedule.

Update: As I suspected, there will be a performance hit for “porting” Windows games to the Mac using Cider.  As MacSlash reports:

The company claims that, performance-wise, “the average user won’t be able to discern any difference,” but does confess that “users are bound to see 10 to 15 percent lower frame rates than they would in a truly native game.”

MacSlash also says that Cider uses the open source WINE project as a basis for their magic.   I wonder how many companies are going to jump on this “free” code to come out with their own products.