Where to from here?

Now that the Nokia challenge is done and dusted it’s back to my original project that I’ve been working on here and there for the last six months. It’s a spin on the Tower Defence genre where instead of having your enemies follow a set path you actually need to dig deep into the ground to release them and they will follow the path that you created. I honestly underestimated the amount of work involved, particularly in the graphics area. I’m only now starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe in another month I’ll have something good enough to release as a public Beta? 

Yeah I’ve been saying that for a while…

Here’s a couple of screenshots of what it looks like now. Maybe releasing these will spur me on to finally finish?

 

How much is possible in a weekend?

Microsoft and Nokia recently put out a challenge to Australian developers: produce apps for the Windows Phone marketplace and score a free Nokia Lumia. 3 apps would get you a Lumia 710 and 4 apps would get you a Lumia 800. This challenge is still running and details can be found here.

Now let’s be honest, I don’t know why anyone would go for the 710. It looks like a great phone but if you’re already developing 3 apps, developing a 4th for the awesome Lumia 800 is not much of a stretch.

With only 50 phones available this competition was all about quantity not quality. I quickly dumped all of my original ambitious ideas in favour of anything I could build, test and submit in half a day. In fact all of my apps could have been done in less but I couldn’t bring myself to publish something that looks like sample code stolen from the web.

Below is the end result. The challenge was great fun and I’m pretty proud of what I was able produce inside of a weekend. It's a testament to the great developer tools and submission process available for Windows Phone that you can go from design to submission in around 6 hours. The only sour experience I had was when Fast Dice failed certification first time around (a rookie mistake with the White Theme!) but the resubmission took 6 days to be retested!

So please check out my submissions for the competition. They’re all free and don’t contain ads. I actually find Score Keeper and Fast Dice to be really useful and I reckon they’re as good as any other similar app out there.

Score Keeper

(marketplace link)

Reaction Timer

(marketplace link)

Fast Dice

(marketplace link)

Flash Memory

(marketplace link)

More than just code

Chances are, when you first start out as a mobile game developer you’ll quickly realise there’s a lot more to a game than just code. It seems obvious, but you forget that all the extra components like graphics, fonts, leaderboards, music and sound effects that go into make a polished product can easily take longer to put together than the actual code.

Thankfully you don’t need to reinvent the wheel and there are a lot of great resources out there already. Daniel Spruce over at Escape Development has put together a great list of free developer resources that you can check out here:


http://escapedevelopment.blogspot.com/2011/12/free-developer-resources.html


While I generally always do my own graphics and art, I’ll freely admit I’m hopeless at music and developing your own sounds effects just isn’t practical. I’ve used almost all the resources on this great list.

One resource in particular I’d like to highlight is Font Squirrel.


http://www.fontsquirrel.com/


The difference between using an appropriate, quality font in your game and using the default font is massive. And in terms of effort it’s one of the simplest and easiest ways to make your game look professional. I didn’t use special fonts in my first game Eclipse since I was worried about font licensing but now that I’ve found a quality set of free fonts I’d never use standard font again (unless I was creating a Metro UI of course!).