Matt

  • “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…

  • Creating a Resource Management Game on iOS

    Over the last week I’ve been trying to reverse engineer some of the hit games on iOS like DragonVale, Pocket Planes, Tiny Tower, Simpsons Tap Out and Paradise Cove. These have been historically some of the most profitable games on the App Store. They are complex resource management type games and I want to create…

  • Getting ready for Winter

    Winter seems to have struck early here in Calgary. It’s left me with a bit of a conundrum for getting to work.  All of the transit options in this city suck including driving your own car. The buses are never on time, and always delayed or late The C-Train doesn’t get me to the office, and gets…

  • A New Game Project

    It’s been a while since I’ve worked on an iOS game.  After the disappointing sales from Zombie Tap Out I figured that the game section of the App Store was getting a little to difficult to compete in. I’m finally ready now to get back in the game and start working on something new.  The idea for…