I love that Sony are doing Playstation Suite. It's great to see a company realise that they need to diversify to grow into new markets. And the best way to do this is to let the community do the hard bit.
About 18 months ago, I created a couple of presentations which were given to the programming dept I was then working for. At the time we had a great weekly spot where someone could present about a useful topic. I ended up splitting my talk into two parts: Code Design and Working Practices. I stumbled upon these presentations this morning so I thought I'd put them up here for people to have a look at, and maybe gain something useful from. 8)
I've been thinking a lot about pricing and marketing lately. Not that I'm due to release my first game any time soon or anything... but it's something that I've heard a lot about from various other developers and on podcasts etc. I've changed my plans on pricing a few times so far... Due to having more time to think about things, and also because I think you have to keep an open mind in a dynamic market.
So the past couple of months have been slow... but not at a standstill 8). I've been busy working away at putting Lua scripting into FC. It kind of feels bad to say that in the 18 years I've been developing games I've never used a scripting language in anger. I think it's probably because the games I did never had complex enough behaviour to require scripting, and that the few people I had talked to who had used scripting languages had scared me off. But all that has changed...
Very sad news to day that Steve Jobs has passed away. Say what you like about his products but you can't deny that the guy was a visionary, an inspiration, and a creator. He followed his heart and never gave up his dreams. He will be deeply missed. Rest in peace Steve - you did good.
'Where are the updates ?' I'm hearing people say... Well, things have slowed down a tad here at Curly Rocket towers the past few weeks. Main reason for this is that I am currently contracting for two separate clients and have no free days to do Curly Rocket stuff. I'm still squeezing some stuff in to any spare time I have - mainly fettling my tools and rendering work, but progress has slowed. Juggling three jobs and a family is pretty tough... believe me.
A few months ago I announced that CurlyRocket would be releasing a portion of its code base up as Open Source. My original intention was to release part of my FC framework as open source while retaining another private part as closed source. Well, this split hasn't worked out as I had hoped and as a result I am releasing the entire FC framework as open source as of now. Before anyone gets all giddy with delight FC is very immature and has LONG way to go before it's in a fit state for proper use by others. Consider this a V0.0.1. But, there is quite a lot of code in there right now.
Just a quickie this one. Curly Rocket is officially six months old! I'm still here and still working on the first project. All is well and going groovy 8)
Last week I made a decision I didn't expect... I dropped support for MBX based iOS devices from my FC framework. This means I'm not going to be selling to iPod Touch 1st and 2nd gen, and also iPhone and iPhone3G are out. For my code to run you'll need iPhone 3GS, iPodTouch 3rd gen or an iPad.
It's been a couple of months since my last tech update blog entry, so it's about time to tell you what I've been up to. The main part of my work for the last couple of months has focused on the data pipeline. I'm pleased to say that the Collada to FCR part of that pipeline has reached a pretty functional stage now, with all my in-game assets being build in Blender, then exported via Collada into my game.
