Developing Upwards

I was really excited about the One Game A Month challenge as soon as I heard about it. For about two years I've struggled in fits and starts to make my way into game development. This hasn't been productive in any of the ways I hoped when I started. Its really difficult to be fairly experienced as a developer, which I believe I am in my day job as a web developer, while struggling really hard at an area in which your experience just doesn't exist. Its like being a pilot who doesn't know how to drive. But this challenge provided a new breath to this little hobby of mine. It gave me a scaffolding to experiment, to learn, to reflect on finished projects. I had spent far too much time on game projects that stretched on far past their exciting phases, bogged down by bad decisions and regret. And it has worked. I have a lot to learn. I have a lot of experience to gain through trial and error and mistake and discovery. I have a lot of fun...

I couldn't even pluralize "dominator" because Nintendo won't let Sony in the door. Nintendo has the handheld game market locked tighter than Fork Knox. This won't be the first place to call out the "Apple is entering the handheld gaming market" flag, but I do think I can lay out the steps they would (or should) take that can lend credibility to the idea. If nothing else, I hope someone there is reading. Apple can't do this alone, but they have a very good friend in another company with a name that starts with A: Adobe. The pair would be the ultimate contender into the very tight market and the approach is amazingly simple. Flash is coming to the iPhone and iTouch, and I'll hope they make bookmarking Flash games easy and give us the option to "fullscreen" them on the devices. Explicit offline caching wouldn't hurt either. The next step is obviously to allow flash apps and games to be installed directly for quick access and immediatel...

When things build up and I haven't posted, what to write about is a difficult thing to decide. This is a dump of recent or queued topics just to get them out of the way for new things. What's Up With This Hip Cat: Looks like we're getting Charlotte Python Group (CharPy) together, and hopefully having some coffee one morning this week. Let me know if you're interested! I'm stretching my legs at a bigger desk in the home office. I'm trying to consider how to approach an open Python position I found in this area versus a possibility with someone I had a great time working with in the past versus moving to Australia down the road. Knitt and Oasis are great little indie games. I wish I could have taken part in PyWeek, but I am so busy! Pyglet looks interesting these days. Took on a tight deadline project at the same time as work on Python Magazine ramped up, because I'm just that willing to bend over for money. I know I don't write enough. I have to write my ...

I would consider myself a gamer. The video game industry has been a huge influence on my life from childhood to parenthood. My father was a gamer, who even owned an arcade as a younger man, before I was born. The last machines, a unremembered pinball unit and a standup Qix were the first things walking in the door of his place. I even had a two-screen, six-player TMNT Turtles in Time arcade machine, which made me the coolest kid among my friends. Yes, I am a gamer. Today I denounce my fellow gamers, and I call out to those of you with any backbone to stand with me in decrying those among us who, basically, just make us look bad. The subject of debate is a recent survey making statements about the percentage of females among the online gaming community. The surprising results state that 64% of online gamers are female , and the response to this news is just as surprising: outright denial. Male gamers seem completely impossible to accept that they are not the majority of gamers, while ...