I’ll be using the Phaser HTML5 2d game development framework. I’m going to make all the work on a Chromebook Pixel using apps from the Chrome Store. I have Xubuntu installed in a Crouton environment in the Chromebook, but I’m only using that to run Tiled, because there’s no Chrome tilemap editor. I’m using Cloud9 as my text editor, and my code will be posted on Github at https://github.com/dreadpiratepj/escape-game.

The theme for LD30 is “Connected Worlds”. I googled the theme and two images were the most striking and inspiring to me:

The first image is by karu-panda on Deviantart ( http://karu-panda.deviantart.com/art/Connected-Worlds-Sunny-Side-Up-153189742 )

The second image is by the architecture & design team of effekt.dk ( http://www.effekt.dk/eka/ )

I chose to make an HTML5 2D game, so I can’t just create a Fez clone, which is what the second image suggests to me.

So I think I’ll make a game where the user has to switch between “warm, sunny, right side up” world and “winter, night time, upside down” world to solve a puzzle. That is way cool, as one of my favorite games is The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, which features an alternate, connected worlds motif.

I think I’ll stick to making a puzzle game rather than a Zelda clone, as I don’t have the time or the art skills to make a Zelda clone, even if I use OGA spritesheets and tilemaps.

Good luck to everyone else in the game jam!

Dread Pirate PJ

A quick recap on the last 2.9 years

• After speaking at OSCON 2009, I moved to Silicon Valley for a job at mobile gaming startup OpenFeint
• I worked on another iPhone games development book, Beginning iPhone Games Development
• I freelanced as an iPhone/Rails developer for a few Silicon Valley companies
• For the last year, I have been working as an iOS developer for a high tech orchard in Cupertino
• I fell in love and got engaged

The move to Silicon Valley has been great for me in terms of employment and quality of life. I’m working in a great, growing field, and loving it. I love all the diversity in the SF Bay area. And I love northern CA weather.

During this time I have kept increasingly busy with work. When I was a freelancer, my spare time between projects was spent trying to get new customers. As any freelancer will tell you, acquiring new projects and customers is as much a full-time effort as working on the projects you get.

Now that I’m working full-time with an established company, I don’t have to worry about where my next gig is going to come from. So this focuses my work efforts between 9 am to 6 pm most weeks. This leaves me a bit of leisure time in between work and spending time with my fiancée and friends.

Which brings me to the main topic of this blog entry: what I will be doing different in what’s left of 2012 and the years ahead.

Games

I’ve always wanted to work in video games, ever since I was a teenager learning programming on a family computer in the mid-80s. So starting with this blog entry, I will put more focus into releasing my first mobile game.

People much busier than I have gotten games and apps published. I’m single, have no kids, my job is not all consuming. I have no excuse. I simply let distractions occupy my time. Things like TV, leisure reading, social networking.

I actually have wanted to make a mobile game for over three years. I have several ideas always in the back burner. I haven’t accomplished it because I haven’t put in the time and effort it needs. Part of it is because I’ve been busy, but part of it is setting the goal and getting it done. Simple as that. This needs to go from “want” to “goal”.

Goals

If you’ve watched the movie “City Slickers”, you are probably familiar with the character named Curly, played by Jack Palance. In one scene, Curly tells Mitch (played by Billie Crystal) “Do you know what the secret to life is?” The answer is “One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don’t mean shit.” The problem is in figuring out what your “one thing” is.

The problem with me and goals is that I’m too easily distracted by a very curious mind and way too many different interests. So the key to my achieving goals is to really focus. Just having the time available or making time isn’t enough.

I’ve done this before, when I worked on the two iOS game development books. It took 90% of my effort just to focus. The other 10% was the actual writing.

So with that, I finish this blog post and I’m going to enjoy my Friday night. It’s my fiancée’s birthday today, so we are going out to dinner. No game hacking tonight. But there’s the rest of the weekend and next week.

As I make progress, I’ll be posting details of how things are going.

Onward with the geekiness!

Note: I meant to publish this a few weeks ago but got caught up doing different things and didn’t publish. Except for my fiancée’s birthday, which is on the day this was published, the other events and decisions documented here are already a couple weeks old and in progress.

There are chapters by :

1. Olivier Hennessy & Clayton Kane, of Posimotion, developers of Bikini Hunt and Apache Lander
2. Joachim Bondo, of Cocoa Stuff; developer of Deep Green, a beautiful chess game for iPhone
3. Richard Zito & Matthew Aitken, of Swipe Interactive, developers of QuickDraw and Pole2Pole
4. Aaron Fothergill, of Strange Flavour, developer of Flick Sport Fishing, one of the top 20 best selling apps on the App Store
5. Brian Greenstone, of Pangea Software, developer of Enigmo and Cro-Mag Rally, two of the top 5 best selling apps on the App Store
6. Mike Kasprzak, of Sykhronics Entertainment; his game Smiles was one of the finalists for Best Mobile Game on the IGF Mobile 2009 competition
7. Mike Lee, co-founder of Tapulous, now at Apple, lead developer of Tap Tap Revenge, the most downloaded game on the history of the App Store
8. And a bonus free chapter by Jamie Gotch, of Subatomic Studios, developers of Fieldrunners, winner of Best Mobile Game on the IGF Mobile 2009 competition

As tech reviewer for the book, I checked everyone’s writing for technical accuracy. That was really a great experience. I learned a lot and had fun running everyone’s sample code and checking their tips and tricks for myself.

I also wrote one chapter for the book, on how to implement RESTful web services for high score leaderboards and achievements on iPhone. There’s code in the chapter for a simple Rails web service, and native code for the iPhone as well. It’s a rather deep look at the subject.

I also collaborated with Jamie Gotch on a bonus free chapter. In the chapter we discussed getting started with programming for iPhone, a few tips and tricks, and the A* path finding algorithm. I also developed a Puyo clone and explained the most important parts of the code.

Full source code for the Puyo game will be provided. There is also source code for 3 other sample apps. All the sample code will be made available the same day as the book release at the book’s support page and at apress.com

This was a very neat experience for me. I’ve wanted to have my name on a computer book, and I’ve enjoyed programming games in my spare time, since before I was a teenager (more than 30 years ago, yo! Where has time gone?)

The iPhone gives me, and everyone with the interest, a chance to develop games for others, in a very cool platform with lots of traction. This book, coupled with Beginning iPhone Development, can give you the tools to reach for the stars with your own creations! Enjoy!

Update: Reader Mateusz points out that there is an effort under way to port the XNA frameworks to other platforms using Mono. It’s great to see what the subversive, creative types come up with all on their own. It would be hilarious if PS3 owners could run XNA games by simply booting Linux. Take that, Redmond! Welcome to our social. LMAO!

My own take is that Sony is taking a laissez-faire approach, a la Franklin D. Roosevelt and the economy: let’s provide the tools, and whatever happens, happens. Let the market take it where it may. (I hope I am not embarrassing Mrs. Freite, my history teacher in high school, by mixing my economic strategies and presidents.)

While that is great, I think they could be a bit more proactive. They could encourage garage game development with the PS3 Linux project, by marketing it as such. A program like the old PSX Net Yaroze, but with PS3s and Linux, could attract some great talent. (See? Sony has been thinking about this garage developer thing for quite a long time.)

IBM and Toshiba see this as another marketing venue for the Power processor line, especially the work on the Cell Engine that they did. Toshiba only promotes Cell within its embedded processor market, not putting an oar in to help with the garage developer thing. IBM is a bit more active, but only within their established promotional circles: developerWorks and alphaWorks. And it is hardly a big push.

Microsoft is, of course, going all out, promoting XNA as a garage developer’s haven, especially generating excitement with the possibility of garage developers selling games on XBox Live Marketplace for both PC and XBox360. In my opinion, MS is doing a better job at pushing their ideas.

It’s like IBM and Sony don’t quite see what it is they have to do, having just provided the tools and sitting back to see what develops. While it’s great they’re not stirring the pot too much, the stew is gonna ruin if there’s no cook minding the stove.

OK, that’s enough analogies for today. Thanks for keeping the conversation going, guys. Comment away, and let’s keep talking. Anyone else have any thoughts to share?

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The Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) is the easiest and cheapest way for programmers to get their hands on the new Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) processor and take it for a drive. Discover what the fuss is all about, how to install Linux on the PS3, and how to get started developing for the Cell BE processor on the PS3.

Let’s ignore the $600 USD “cheapest” flame bait and concentrate on the business significance of Sony and IBM providing and promoting Linux for the PS3, shall we?

The PS3 is not the first game console officially sanctioned by the manufacturer to run Linux out of the box. For a few years, Sony sold a $99 Linux kit for the PS2, available only through their online store. It was discontinued early last year, and is now only available on eBay.

But why would Sony provide Linux for any of their video game consoles? What do they have to gain? In business, nothing is done “just” for the benefit of the consumer, much less for pure “free as in freedom” idealism. In the end, it all comes down to driving revenue and profits up, which ultimately pleases the shareholders. Cynical, perhaps, but do you really believe a public company as large as Sony does anything if not for the sake of revenue and profits? Any activity that does not somehow help improve those two factors, will not be seen very positively with the shareholders.

But still, what does it mean? How does PS3 Linux translate into revenue and profits for Sony? Let’s examine this some more, in the context of an obscure game console manufacturer with a similar strategy.

In Korea, the GP32 game console may not have run Linux, but the manufacturer provided on its website, a full set of open source programming tools that ran on Windows. Linux and Mac OS X support was added by the GP32 developer community shortly later. This made the GP32 the first off-the-shelf game console where the users were officially encouraged to make games for it. GamePark, the makers of the GP32, followed up nearly four years later with the Linux-powered GP2X, which also had a free, full set of development tools, including most of the source for the device’s implementation of Linux.

The response to the consoles was great, both in its native Korea and around the world. There is a healthy global open source game development community. Code-savvy game geeks from all around the world have taken to the GP32 and GP2X. Instead of dismal failure competing against Nintendo and Sony, GamePark has survived and grown against all odds. The gadget-happy Koreans responded despite fierce competition, and a healthy Korean commercial game developer community has grown to serve the Korean GP32 market. Many of these commercial developers were founded by the proverbial “two guys in a garage,” propelled to creativity by the open community GamePark fostered.

So back to the PS3. Sure, it’s freakishly expensive for just a single threaded, single tasking, web browser, digital photo gallery, photo slideshow player, propietary-format movie player, game console. But with Linux and the Blender Game Kit, OpenGL, SDL, etc., this is a garage game coder’s dream workstation on the cheap, with high-definition accelerated 3D graphics, surround sound, and all kinds of fun wireless tech at the developer’s fingertips. At $600 for a 60 GB model with 512 MB of RAM, it would make a nicer Linux computer than most sub-$1000 Windows PCs out there.

Perhaps a cottage gaming industry will grow out of the PS3 Linux strategy, like the GP32’s in Korea. Which makes this Linux play by Sony the direct competitor to Microsoft’s XNA move. You see, both Sony and Microsoft see independent game developers as the future savior of the game industry.

The big game publishers and developers screwed themselves, just as the MPAA and RIAA did, by making production ever more expensive, formulaic, and insipidly uncreative, and by depending on the quarterly mega-blockbuster to survive. They did this at a time when more people than ever have access to the means of production and distribution of digital creative content.

The goal of Sony’s Linux strategy and of Microsoft’s XNA, is to attract the independent game developers to their respective platforms. Microsoft believes that giving the tools away for “free as in free beer,” while keeping the secret sauce bottled up, is the successful strategy. Sony believes making the tools as open as possible without screwing the pooch is the the best strategy.

Now, as an open source fan, I will argue that a truly open community of coders, without central control and oversight, is going to prevail over the “you must please the gatekeeper” culture Microsoft wants to impose with XNA on XBox360.

But let’s not be too idealistic and see this independent game developer thing for what it really is. Just like IBM’s open source moves and Tim O’Reilly’s publishing strategy, both Microsoft’s and Sony’s strategies are all about the alpha geek mind share, and self-interest in the increase in revenue it generates.

But cynical as that may sound, open source is still the better thing. It gives more control to the developer and imposes less order, which leads to greater opportunity for creativity to go where it may. Anything less than an open technology and open community will stave off innovation before it even has a chance to set in.

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