Last night I was finally able to attend one of the local IGDA (International Game Developers Association) socials. I’ve missed the last few because other stuff kept getting in the way. I’m really glad I finally made it to one of the socials last night.

Last night there was a focus on GDC. A bunch of local game developers talked about going to GDC, what they learned, what they liked, what was disappointing. It was neat to get a bunch of different opinions on whether or not the show was worth going to from other Toronto developers.

After the talks on GDC everyone just hung out, had some beers, and talked. I got a chance to meet some really cool local developers last night. It was really nice to be able to talk to some local people who also love making games.

One thing I wanted to mention is that the Toronto Game Jam is coming up very soon! It’s happening May 1-3 here in Toronto. It’s an crazy weekend of building video games at an insane pace. I’d been reading about it, but I met one of the guys who runs it last night and I’d really like to try it this year. There’s some information on their website, but the registration isn’t up yet, though I’m told that should be happening soon:

• T.O. Jam (www.tojam.ca)
  

From last night’s gathering, it seems like Toronto has a thriving indie development scene going on, much of which I wasn’t aware of. It was exciting to meet so many people making games locally.

I also got asked a lot of questions about why I chose iPhone development over console development or PC/Mac development. I was also asked a lot about whether I was going to do a PC/Mac version of Dapple. If you’ve been reading the blog since the start (of which I know there are about 20 of you), then you’ll remember that Dapple actually started as a PC/Mac game. The initial prototypes were all done in Playfirst’s Playground SDK, and the original intent was to release it as a PC/Mac title. It was only after I had a prototype that I enjoyed playing that I decided to try to port it to the iPhone, and at that point I decided to push it out on the iPhone instead.

However, talking about all of this last night got me thinking more and more about porting the game back to PC/Mac. It would be a fair amount of work, I think, unless I went with straight OpenGL. The biggest challenge would be with the art, as all the artwork is sized for the iPhone.

Anyway, I haven’t decide yet if that’s something I’m going to pursue. There’s part of me that thinks it might be a good idea to generate new revenue that way, but there’s part of me that’s yelling “let’s do something new! Let’s do something new!” Then there’s also part of me that worries that if I spent another month or two porting it to PC/Mac, there’s a good chance it wouldn’t make back the investment. I think I need to do more research.

Owen

This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 at 11:39 am and is filed under Art, Business, iPhone, Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.