Dtoid keeps eating my cblogs. Let's see, third time's the charm?

Yeah. I kinda tried to keep my opinions to myself regarding the whole "developer + lousy attitude = fail" situation, but everyone hits critical mass eventually, right? I'm at my wit's end here, and I need answers. More specifically, I need you (yes, you there) to read my post concerning professionalism in the game industry and weigh in with some sort of insightful input that I can use to better cultivate my career. Shameless self-promotion in a cblog? Sure, why not. What's a little traffic redirection between friends?

Comment here or on the site, whichever is most convenient for ya.

Yo ho ho, kiddies!

The game I announced back in May is now finished and ready for your grubby paws to manhandle it! It's 5 minutes long, completely self-explanatory, and Freakin' Awesome (TM).



Download it here, and let me know what you think in the comments!

Funny timing for Doc Boa to announce his development intentions literally hours before I post this, but dat's cool. Although I can guarantee that my game has a much smaller budget:



Copypasta from my site:

The game is called Late Again, and it follows the exploits of a downtrodden cubicle jockey who awakens to discover that he's late for work. And you've got to decide if he's going to take the safe route to the office, or explore an unfamiliar and potentially disastrous alternative. It's short - maybe 5 minutes - but I like how it's coming together, especially for a first attempt. I was deeply moved by Jason Rohrer's Passage when I first played it last year, and I think I'm subconsciously trying to achieve the same thing; a really short game that somehow expresses something valuable. I'll let y'all know how it comes together! You can expect to play it in June.

...yet everything in this article applies squarely to me. I play Eve Online more than anything else now, simply because it's the only game that doesn't require me to actually play it in order to become more awesome.

Shit, and I'm a game designer. At least I still spend time, you know, designing.

Oh, and hi again Dtoid. Been a while.

Okay, so I'm a bit of a closet Apple fanboy. I have a Windows machine because I love my PC games, but when you really boil it down I prefer to use a Mac - my homebuilt PC is actually dual-booting XP and the iATKOS hack of Leopard. While most of my self-taught game projects are hastily slapped together in Game Maker 7 (yeah, laugh it up, you bastards), I spend a lot of time screwing around with the Mac-only game engine Unity 3D. It's surprisingly robust for such a straightforward toolset, and the tutorials made it easy for me to get a handle on scripting languages (code-retarded as I am).

On a seemingly-unrelated-yet-parallel note, I never really cared that much about the iPhone. It's cool, sure, if a bit overpriced. Its existence certainly doesn't push me to the paroxysms of rage you might expect from a more discerning geek, but I never found that much to get excited about. It didn't really engage me.

Well, until I saw this.

(Video here - skip ahead to 01:00:00).

Now, I'm not a rabid fan of Super Monkey Ball. But seeing a game like that - a dead ringer for a PSP title - running on a mobile device built around digital distribution was like looking into the face of GOD. They built the damn thing in two weeks and it ran at 30FPS. Halle-motherfuckin'-lujah.

So, now that Apple has released their for-realz iPhone SDK, it's only a matter of time before the Unity player gets a mobile port. Until today, I would've killed for the chance to make a PSP title that wasn't guaranteed to net a loss, but now it looks like I can pull off a similar feat by myself for less than a grand...

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Development
Unity indie license: $250
iPhone developer registration: $99 (!)

Models and Animations
Cheetah3D: $129

Textures
Photoshop CS3 upgrade: $199
imageSynth plugin: $99

Music and Sound Effects
Logic Express: $199

TOTAL: $975

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...and distribute the result on iTunes. EPIC WIN, says I.

What about the rest of you? Did this announcement change the way you look at the iPhone?