Matt

  • Progress on New Game

    So the new game is going to be called Tycho City. It’s based on building a lunar base and battling other bases for the moon’s valuable resources. There’s a mix of two styles of gameplay the first is the simulation of the moon base with building and upgrading mines and energy collectors. The second is…

  • iAd Download Script

    Unfortunately Apple doesn’t have a nice easy API for downloading your revenue numbers from iAds. The only way around that right now is screen scraping the information, or manually downloading the reports. Thanks to the awesome python requests library I was able to put something together in just 50 lines of code. It’s a function…

  • Tree up

  • “Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal”

    That quote from Steve Jobs in 1996 holds true for more reasons than are apparent at first thought. I’m currently working towards completing my first ‘real’ game on iOS but with a 2 person team it will take an exhaustive amount of work to produce something that fulfils our vision. Cutting scope is the easiest…

  • Painted Living Room

    Sometimes all that’s needed is a little bit of paint. Last weekend Heather and I started painting our living room in an effort to make the space more liveable. By painting over the brown and beige walls with white the furniture becomes more of a focus and the room feels brighter and bigger. With a…

  • Virility

    Having a game that naturally promotes itself is a challenge. The old techniques of tweeting your score or sharing the app on facebook are not enough to make something popular or have it go viral. The mechanic to make something go viral has to be much more deeply integrated. The virility of games like Draw…

  • Learning from Games

    For the past few weeks I have been playing a lot of games and trying to learn a few things about how to make better ones. I’ve been dissecting games like Simpsons Tap Out, Pocket Planes, Skylanders, Paradise Cove and DragonVale. And it’s been very educational. Besides learning about what makes them tick technically I…

  • Winter Bike Riding

    So I decided that rather than paying for driving/parking to get to work this winter I am going to bike. I picked up a cheap bike from canadian tire last night that should be able to survive the -30 degree temperatures outside and should be sturdy enough to not break down on the 6KM ride…

  • Loading iOS Assets From The Web

    One of the big challenges with making a big iPhone game is that to do the graphics justice at the caliber expected by gamers these days is hard. There’s just too much data to package the iPhone/Retina iPhone/4 inch iPhone/iPad/Retina iPad assets all together in one bundle. So for my latest game I’m kicking things…

  • Winterstart Banff Run

    Last night Heather and I went to Banff for a night run. It was a pretty enjoyable event that we’ll be sure to do again next year.  The race was packed with 2000 runners all done up with glow sticks and head lamps running in the dark.  To cap it off the after run party…