I’ve been struggling with coming up with a logo design for Streaming Colour Studios lately. It’s taken up much more time that I originally thought it would. I hired a friend, and very talented graphic designer, to design a new look for the website, but I wasn’t really in the position (financially) to hire someone to do a logo for me. Without a logo, I don’t want to launch the new site design. It’s a vicious cycle.

The trouble with doing this myself is that I’m finding it hard to separate myself, as client, from myself, as designer. I keep trying new ideas. I think the one I did this morning is probably my stongest one to date, but I’ve thought that about the last four concepts I did. At any rate, it’s taking up a lot of my time that could be spent coding, but it’s important. My goal is to have it wrapped up by the end of the week and then get back to coding.

In other news, I’ve decided to take on some contract programming work. When I started the company I had aspirations of being the “struggling indie developer” who doesn’t need nothin’ from nobody. The problem is that at some point reality sets in and the idea of having a little income on the side while I continue to develop my own work becomes too appealing. It will be nice to be able to pay for things like rent and food.

The contract work will, no doubt, take up a lot of my time over the next little while, so I may not be doing quite as much work on my game as I’d originally hoped. However, the good news is that the contract should provide me with the income I need to actually continue to afford to both live and work on my own project. That’s a good thing.

Owen

After reading the terms of use for the iPhone SDK I realised that I won’t be allowed to say anything specific about the SDK or using the SDK. However, I think I can safely say this: after three days of mucking about with the SDK and my prototype, I now have my prototype running in the simulator! It’s missing all the user interface bells and whistles that Playground was providing for me (pause menu, main menu, game over popup, etc), but the game itself is basically identical to my other prototype. This is very exciting! It has proved to me that it’s definitely a viable platform for me to be developing on.

If I can figure out how to reverse integrate the changes I made to the game logic, by further decoupling the Model from the View, I think I may even be able to keep the game logic platform-agnostic. That would be ideal. That would mean that any changes I made to the game logic would then automatically carry over between all three platforms I want to develop for. Only View and Controller elements would have to change on a per-platform basis.

This is all causing great excitement in the programming and software architecture parts of my brain.

Owen

I want to take a little detour today and talk about something unrelated to my game development.

For years now I’ve been thinking about the debate over games as art. The topic is one of great contention within the industry. For every gamer that screams that Final Fantasy VII (or whatever version) changed their life, there’s another arguing that games can never be considered art. Even Roger Ebert (my absolute favourite movie reviewer) got in on the debate last year. I disagreed with a lot of his points, but I also agreed with some.

For myself, I keep coming down on different sides of the fence. Every time I sit down to write an essay on why games are, or are not, art, I end up convincing myself of the other.

The trouble is, I think we might be thinking about this all wrong. I watched the video posted online this morning of the opening 14 minutes of Little Big Planet. This “game” looks to defy our very notion of what we consider a game to be. The developers have been talking about how, yes, there is a game you can play in there. But you can also animate your own characters, that you have created, and even make them emote. You can create music, or tell stories with it. But is the game art?

But you see, I think that’s the wrong question to ask. I’m starting to wonder if maybe the games themselves aren’t art, but the result of a player interacting with the game might be. If this is the case, the game itself merely becomes the medium through which the art is created. It becomes the artist’s brush and canvas, through which the player is able to create art. If Little Big Planet delivers what it claims it will, it could become an entire creative medium through which people might create films, graphic novels, music, and yes, even games. So is it the game that’s art, or the result of playing with it that has the potential to be art?

I don’t know. I don’t have the answers; mostly just questions.

Owen

There’s a great article over at GameCareerGuide today about ideas for games, why a great idea might not end up as a great game, why you need a lot of ideas, and how to keep track of your ideas:

• The Idea is Not the Game (www.gamecareerguide.com)

The article has also reminded me that I need to find some kind of remote backup for my source repository. It’s fairly secure in that the source exists on two computers and the repo exists on a RAID server. However, if my office burned down, I’d be kind of screwed…note: find remote backup server.

I spent yesterday going through Apple’s iPhone development videos and reading some of their “intro to iPhone development” documents. Objective-C has a very different syntax from what I’m used to. I was also finding the model of windows vs views a little confusing until I read some of the documentation. I think it’s starting to make sense now. I might actually try some coding today.

Owen

A new day, a new week. My post on Friday wasn’t very cheerful, so I thought I’d follow up with what came out of that. It turns out that pushing through and forcing myself to code was the right course of action in this instance. By the end of the day on Friday I had implemented one of the new end conditions I had been going over in my head. It turns out that it’s actually pretty cool. It seems to balance the game a lot better. I find that I’m losing the game in different places now, and I feel like I have a lot more control over the outcome of the game. This is a good thing. I think this is the solution I’ll be working with for now. It will undoubtedly need extensive play-testing and tuning, but I think it’s a good direction.

A friend of mine from Vancouver was in town over the weekend and we had a chance to meet up for a cup of coffee and chat. We were talking about the game I was working on and then started talking about iPhone games. After our conversation I started thinking more and more about iPhone/iPod Touch development. My plan was to build my game and release it for PC and Mac, then port it to the iPhone at some point. Now I’m starting to wonder if I should try to get a simplified version going for the iPhone sooner, rather than later.

I started thinking about it and realised that most of my time spent gaming recently has been on my iPod Touch. I have it with me all the time, so when I’m on the subway, or waiting in a long line-up somewhere, out comes the iPod for a quick game of Trism, or De Blob.

So I started wondering how much work it would be to port my prototype to the iPhone. I already have a Mac, and I’ve been using XCode to do my prototype development so far. All I’d need to do is download the SDK, learn Objective C and rewrite the rendering part of my game. Hah…sounds easy!

Obviously I don’t have a tonne (yes, that’s a metric tonne) of time to devote to this, but I’m thinking I might spend two days and see how far I get. At the end of two days, if it looks like I can have something running within the week, I’ll keep going. If not, I’ll look at priorities and see where it might fit in the schedule.

Owen