Month: December 2005
-
Casual Game Artwork: From Concept to Completion
What’s involved in building a casual game these days? There is a lot more to making a casual game than most people realize. I learned this first hand recently, as I participated in the 2005 OMG Cup these past two months. I always believed casual games were simple and quick to develop. Compared to the…
-
Unity 1.2 Released
Over the Edge has released their Mac game development tool Unity 1.2. Some of the cool new features include: Ragdoll Physics Wizard 1st Person Controller Render Textures on Materials Full Screen Graphics Effects
-
Tracking Game Hype
Robert Blum shares a few links he’s found useful in tracking the hype and success of computer games.
-
Bullfrog in the News
Bullfrog was briefly mentioned on the french website Jeux Mac For those of us that are French impaired, here is a snippet from the google translation of the article: Whereas OriginalMacgames Contest is about to close its doors in order to return its verdict, there it is still possible to go to download the registered…
-
OMG Cup 2005 Finalists Announced
iDevGames has announced the results of the public voting round for the Original Mac Games Cup 2005. Congratulations to the finalists: Escort Wing (William Hogben, Stephen Johnson) 8.72 Nball (Matteo Guarnieri) 8.28 MacBornes (Alexandre Colucci) 8.27 Tracktor Beam (Will Thimbleby) 7.88 Pawns (Matt Diamond) 7.86 Pakimono (Joachim Ante, Aras Pranckevicius, Raimund Schumach) 7.81
-
Prototypes vs. Design Documents
GBGames has an interesting discussion going on about the importance of prototypes and design documents in game design, specifically casual games in direct reference to the Gamasutra article with James Gwetzman of Popcap Games. It seems that Popcap has an “extremely prototype heavy” development process. Some of GB’s reader comments focus on this importance of…
-
Game Random Events
Brian Green has posted a nice bit of BSD licensed C++ code for handling random events in computer games in response to Terro Nova’s comments on the subject.
-
2 Days Left in OMG Cup Public Voting
If you haven’t already checked out entries in the 2005 Original Mac Games Cup, you only have two days left before the public voting phase closes. On December 15, 2005 the contest will move into the second round where the top entries will face the official judges. 36 free Mac games are waiting to be…
-
Objective-C Memory Management and Error Handling
Memory management in Cocoa & Objective-C tends to be confusing at times, especially when trapping and handling errors. Chris Hanson has written a nice article describing the basics of memory managment and error handling with @try, @catch, and @finally code blocks. Related Links: Cocoa Memory Management & Exceptions Memory Management Rules [Apple Developer Connection]
-
Game Icon and Artwork – Part 4
In Part 3 of this series on the artwork behind Bullfrog, I revealed the revisions leading up to the final version of the Bullfrog application icon. For Part 4 of the series, I originally planned to begin taking you through step by step as I worked with my artist, Jordan Langille to specify and refine…