Tonight Pocket Gems is hosting a panel on inclusion and gender diversity in the games industry.
The meetup is from 6 to 9pm and there is a suggested $5 donation. All proceeds from the event will go to Girls Who Code.
Topics to be discussed include how to create a space for diversity at your company, the tangible benefits of having a more diverse workplace, and tips for empowering women, people of color, LGBT community at your company.
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Saturday, August 9, 2014
Hero Hacks
Hero Hacks took place this weekend in SF. There were other hackathons taking place in SF the same weekend, as well as the popular music festival "Outside Lands", so attendance was low.
Hero hacks was a wearable hackathon. There were many sponsors providing devices for the weekend including Oculus, Pebble, and Jawbone.
I used the hackathon as an opportunity to explore Pebble. It is the only smart watch currently on the market that supports iOS to my knowledge. As an avid iPhone user, it made it the best smart watch to develop for.
Pebble has an online IDE that makes getting started with Pebble easy. You'll need a Pebble smart watch as there is currently no simulator. You should also have an iPhone or Android phone. You need to have Bluetooth turned on on the smart watch as well as your phone and you'll need to pair the devices. You also need your computer and phone to be on the same wi-if network. If you have all that, you can create an account on cloud pebble, create a new project, and load it on to your watch.
Making a watch face is simple and it was all I was able to accomplish in the 24 hours. More interesting are the watch apps. I started the process of making a game for the watch. I found it a little different than mobile game development.
The input available consists of 4 buttons and an accelerometer which you can also use to detect screen taps. However, it is not a touch device and there is no way to see where the user tapped. The display is black and white and fairly small.
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Casual Connect
The Casual Connect conference was held in San Francisco July 22nd through July 24th. It is a conference for those in the cassual market. This includes mobile and browser social and free-to-play games.
This was the second year it has been held in San Francisco. Before it was held in Seatle. There is a Casual Connect conference held 4 times a year throughout the globe, and San Francisco is the USA location.
As part of the conference, there was Indie Prize showcase. The showcase highlighted exceptional indie development teams. The winners were annoced at San Francisco city hall during the conference. You can view this year's winning teams at (http://usa.indieprize.org).
There were many interesting talks with tracks for mobile, creativity and other specialties.
Friday, July 18, 2014
Bubble Maze Post Mortem
Bubble Maze is a mobile game that I developed for for iPhone®, iPad® and for Android™. It is available for free. It doesn’t have adds, in-app purchases, a score, or levels. It does have a goal, and when you reach that goal you have solved the puzzle and won the game.
It was my first attempt at releasing a mobile game. I consider it a success. I set a goal of completing the game and having it available on the Apple app store in 4 months, in time for GDC and my birthday. I was overcome with joy when I received approval from Apple and my game went live on the app store.
The bubble maze itself was designed by Oskar van Deventer. He is a brilliant world-renowned puzzle designer and was gracious enough to let me build a mobile version of his puzzle. It is a unique maze that is filled with water and has an air bubble trapped inside. The air bubble is what you move throughout the maze to get to the goal. Since the air bubble travels up in the water, you have to orient the maze so that the path you want to take points upwards.
Within a week my spirits were dampened. I had received word from Oskar van Deventer. There was a problem with the game. This was a serious problem because the game was live, and there was no guarantee that every user that had downloaded the game would update it, so some users would forever be stuck with a buggy game. The problem was the way the bubble moved. I had used a physics engine, and the bubble moved as I thought it should through the maze. The problem was that it was supposed to be a maze and it wasn’t. It was a different kind of puzzle, a dexterity puzzle. That wasn’t the kind of puzzle he designed.
I fixed the game to make it so the bubble moves until it hits a wall. The fix only took one day to code and test on devices, but the fix had to be approved by Apple. A couple weeks later version 1.1 came out and it was truly a bubble maze.
The next big setback came at GDC. No one was impressed with my game. GDC is full of game developers, many of whom have been doing this for decades. Here I was with my first released game ever. It was okay though, Bubble Maze 1.1 was just the start. I was already working on version 2. It had more puzzle levels, and even a level editor so you could make your own levels and save them on your device. I had tons of other game ideas and prototypes in the works as well.
Then another let down. I found out about the review of my app. There is only one review for version 1.1. It is 2 stars and ends by saying “It’s just passable at best.” I don’t know why I cared so much about the review. It was my only review, so it represented what everyone else felt about the game. I went from feeling like a success to feeling like a failure. I couldn’t work up the motivation to work on version 2 any more. Who would even want to play it? I felt like I had let down Oskar van Deventer. If any experienced developer had made his puzzle, he would have gotten the 5 stars he deserves. I felt bad for trying to take it on as my first game.
I couldn’t work up the motivation to work on any games. I went back to teaching myself programming. I even signed up for one of those code bootcamps to turn you into a software engineer. It was a waste of time. They are all focused on web development. I wanted to be a mobile game developer, I had told them that in my application. I was told to first work as a web developer. Why? I thought the program was in software engineering? I then came to realize that I was already a software engineer because I had worked on mobile games that had shipped and were being sold on app stores! I had even shipped a game on my own, thus owning the entire development process of creating and distributing a mobile game. What further proof did I need that I was indeed a mobile game developer?
To get back my love of indie game development, I started signing up for game jams and hackathons again. I also started going to tech talks and meet ups. At a tech talk I met some people who encouraged me to volunteer as a TA to help underrepresented groups in tech.
Through mentoring those more novice than myself, I have come to appreciate the skills that I have, and more importantly, my passion for game development and programming that has driven me to acquire those skills. I have started to take on native iOS development again. I am learning the new Swift programming language and I plan to release another game for the app store.
While this was going on I met up with Oskar van Deventer and had a chance to talk about Bubble Maze. He wasn’t disappointed. It was passable. As long as he was okay with Bubble Maze, I was too. I am proud of it as my first mobile game, and my games are sure to improve over time. Bubble Maze is just the beginning.
It was my first attempt at releasing a mobile game. I consider it a success. I set a goal of completing the game and having it available on the Apple app store in 4 months, in time for GDC and my birthday. I was overcome with joy when I received approval from Apple and my game went live on the app store.
The bubble maze itself was designed by Oskar van Deventer. He is a brilliant world-renowned puzzle designer and was gracious enough to let me build a mobile version of his puzzle. It is a unique maze that is filled with water and has an air bubble trapped inside. The air bubble is what you move throughout the maze to get to the goal. Since the air bubble travels up in the water, you have to orient the maze so that the path you want to take points upwards.
Within a week my spirits were dampened. I had received word from Oskar van Deventer. There was a problem with the game. This was a serious problem because the game was live, and there was no guarantee that every user that had downloaded the game would update it, so some users would forever be stuck with a buggy game. The problem was the way the bubble moved. I had used a physics engine, and the bubble moved as I thought it should through the maze. The problem was that it was supposed to be a maze and it wasn’t. It was a different kind of puzzle, a dexterity puzzle. That wasn’t the kind of puzzle he designed.
I fixed the game to make it so the bubble moves until it hits a wall. The fix only took one day to code and test on devices, but the fix had to be approved by Apple. A couple weeks later version 1.1 came out and it was truly a bubble maze.
The next big setback came at GDC. No one was impressed with my game. GDC is full of game developers, many of whom have been doing this for decades. Here I was with my first released game ever. It was okay though, Bubble Maze 1.1 was just the start. I was already working on version 2. It had more puzzle levels, and even a level editor so you could make your own levels and save them on your device. I had tons of other game ideas and prototypes in the works as well.
Then another let down. I found out about the review of my app. There is only one review for version 1.1. It is 2 stars and ends by saying “It’s just passable at best.” I don’t know why I cared so much about the review. It was my only review, so it represented what everyone else felt about the game. I went from feeling like a success to feeling like a failure. I couldn’t work up the motivation to work on version 2 any more. Who would even want to play it? I felt like I had let down Oskar van Deventer. If any experienced developer had made his puzzle, he would have gotten the 5 stars he deserves. I felt bad for trying to take it on as my first game.
I couldn’t work up the motivation to work on any games. I went back to teaching myself programming. I even signed up for one of those code bootcamps to turn you into a software engineer. It was a waste of time. They are all focused on web development. I wanted to be a mobile game developer, I had told them that in my application. I was told to first work as a web developer. Why? I thought the program was in software engineering? I then came to realize that I was already a software engineer because I had worked on mobile games that had shipped and were being sold on app stores! I had even shipped a game on my own, thus owning the entire development process of creating and distributing a mobile game. What further proof did I need that I was indeed a mobile game developer?
To get back my love of indie game development, I started signing up for game jams and hackathons again. I also started going to tech talks and meet ups. At a tech talk I met some people who encouraged me to volunteer as a TA to help underrepresented groups in tech.
Through mentoring those more novice than myself, I have come to appreciate the skills that I have, and more importantly, my passion for game development and programming that has driven me to acquire those skills. I have started to take on native iOS development again. I am learning the new Swift programming language and I plan to release another game for the app store.
While this was going on I met up with Oskar van Deventer and had a chance to talk about Bubble Maze. He wasn’t disappointed. It was passable. As long as he was okay with Bubble Maze, I was too. I am proud of it as my first mobile game, and my games are sure to improve over time. Bubble Maze is just the beginning.
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Swift
Swift is the new programming language introduced by Apple at WWDC which took place in San Francisco June 2-6th.
Soon after, a new meetup group in San Francisco was formed by Tamao called "Swift SF". It had its first meetup Wednesday night. We divided into groups based on experience then went through the Swift programming language together.
To use Swift, you need Xcode 6 which is in beta, so you'll also have to be a registered apple developer (iOS or Mac). It is an improvement over Objective-C which is what you used to have to develop in for Mac or iOS. It can be mixed in with Objective-C as well which is great if you have already been developing for Mac or iOS.
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Leap Motion v2
There was a meetup Tuesday night for leap motion developers at Rocketspace. There were a series of talks preceded by demos of the Leap Motion v2 software, which is in beta.
One of the talks was in using leap motion in Unity. The examples were mostly games. The leap motion device is a really fun input for games and v2 is a much needed improvement to the system. It now tracks your hand as an object, which is more useful than the tracking in V1.
Monday, June 2, 2014
Tizen Developer Conference
Tizen is an open-source operating system for all device areas, such as mobile, TV, connected vehicles, and wearables. The 3rd annual Tizen Developer Conference is June 2-4 at the Hilton.
There were many games that placed in the Tizen developer challenge that are being showcased at the conference.
There is also a hacker lounge with Starcraft, Pacman, Xbox, ping-pong, and air hockey.
All in all it is a much more affordable conference (though not nearly as popular) than WWDC which is happening at the same time.
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