Archive for » 2009 «
After a long slow summer of almost no development on FaceRace, we’re finally back in the saddle and roaring along. My lead programmer became unavailable and it’s taken a while to find a replacement, but things are looking bright for a release well before Christmas.
I’ve been meaning to write a blog post about what it’s like to be a game designer and graphics guy making an iPhone game. The delay and extra expense caused by losing my programmer this summer sure has made me wish I knew how to code myself — but more on that another time.
Our new programmer, Thomas Rab, is an experienced programmer but new to iPhone dev. He’s enjoying it more than even he expected, and we’re hard at work to bring some great new features and optimizations to FaceRace. Stay tuned, we’re getting close!
If you are interested in beta testing FaceRace, we’ve signed up with iBetaTest.com. This is a service that connects developers with willing beta testers, and helps facilitate software distribution and AdHoc provisioning.
So if you like, you can sign up there to beta test. We’re offering a $25 iTunes card to whoever submits the most unique, legitimate, undocumented bugs before October 15, 2009.
Marketing your iPhone app effectively is a matter of concern for all App Store developers. Getting visibility among the rising tide of apps in the App Store is an overwhelming obstacle for indie developers with limited budgets. Here are a few marketing resources and tips that I’ve come across that have been helpful to me. Click here to continue…
We are opening up FaceRace to beta tester applications. The single-device mode of the game is feature-complete, so we thought we’d get some feedback on the gameplay while finishing off the networking and Facebook Connect features. Click here to continue…
This month’s IGDA meeting is coming up this Wednesday, August 19th, 2009. It is going to focus on two of the current Fortune Cat teams, Kim Lazaruk of Nightshift Interactive Inc. for their game FlipIt, and ourselves, We Heart Games for FaceRace.
It starts at 7pm at the Princess Campus of Red River College.
The PAX 10 winners have been announced. Congratulations to all the winners! This is my first year as a developer for one of these contests, so I have a new appreciation for how much work goes into these games, and getting them ready to submit them for review. The quality of work shown in this list just goes to show how important the independent game dev community is. Click here to continue…
I was looking around for an easy way to create a checkbox on the iPhone, and it turns out there isn’t one. At least, not one readily available. I found a couple of posts, and thought that there should be an easy way to do this.
In that first post, he refers to this:
[button setSelected:YES];
So the method I came up with was to have a button with separate graphics for the required three states:
Normal
Highlighted
Selected Click here to continue…
We Heart Games is excited to announce that we’ve entered FaceRace into The PAX 10, an independent game developers contest put on by Penny Arcade.
If we make it into the top 10, we get four free exhibitor passes and a kiosk at Penny Arcade Expo, a huge gaming party (convention) in Seattle in September. Winners will be announced in July. We’ll let you know how it goes, either way.
After many months of secrecy (and furious development), the curtains have parted and FaceRace for iPhone has been revealed. Keep your eyes on this site (or subscribe to our RSS feed) for more information as development of the game progresses. We’re very excited to be able to launch this game, and we think you’re going to love it!
We had a pre-launch party for FaceRace on April 24th and it was a blast. The first playtest of the game went amazingly well, and feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Thanks to everyone who came out and played.
The purpose of the party was actually to generate new ideas for the word list that will ship with the game. To “inspire” (bribe) extra creativity, we gave away a new iPod nano to the person who submitted the most usable items. This generated a huge amount of hilarious new items for the word list, more than doubling what we had previously. I can’t wait to see what kinds of photos get taken for these expressions!
Here are the winning photos from one round of playtesting: Click here to continue…
