Voyaging Mind

Another night another update! I doubt I will keep this pace up for long but while it lasts it has to be a good thing right? As part of learning Dart I wrote a small clone of the worm game from the 1980s. Not the version made popular on the Amiga but the one where your tail grows longer when you eat apples. My version uses simple geometric shapes which totally avoided the need to draw anything. It is  really a bit of learning code as I look to churn through a reasonable amount of Dart code to get a better feel for coding in dart. I have also been taking a look at Web GL in dart. It would be fair to say it has been a long time since I did any proper GL programming. I am talking about when most hardware had very limited support for shaders. It is good fun updating that area of knowledge even if I am not sure what I am going to do with it.

Another aspect to brands that I did not cover in the last post is that if you are a lone developer or small team you can make yourself/company the brand. People will pick up you latest game because it is made by you. This is an indie advantage as it is hard for large companies to retain the personal feel that is needed for this. It seems to work, many indies games developers do it. It does ever so slightly limit the games you can make as it is hard to make something that is distant from your previous game as people that like your brand may not like it, meaning your brand reach will gradually reduce in size or perhaps just alter. Given you are unlikely to succeed in this unless you are making games you love and it shows through via twitter/facebook/plus then the idea of limiting the games you make to the ones that you want to make is on the whole not to bad a deal with the devil :) Honestly if I was trying to build up into a full time indie game developer then this is the route ...

I don't consume much news as most of it equates to noise for the brain. Much is designed to evoke reaction rather than inform or educate. I consume just about enough to not be clueless about events in the world but not too much for it to consume much time. I would rather spend my time in different ways. One piece to tech gaming development news that filtered through to me is the discussion of brands in the mobile market. Brands are important to games companies as they provide a bed rock from which to base your company or pull it out of troubled water if an experimental idea goes wrong. Madden hit 25 years old I think may have triggered some of this discussion. Will people still be playing Angry Birds in 15 years time? How about Candy Crush?  I suspect because of their limited style of play they will follow the path of worms back in the 1990's. They will get follow ups but none will match the success of the original but they will remain profitable for years to come. I a...

As I have been gradually writing a very simple game using CoffeeScript and HTML5 I have re-imersed myself into HTML5 game development. This pretty much means I have been lurking on forums and reading news items more attentively. I have probably had a break of between 6-12 months since I last took a good look at the HTML5 game development world. It is fair to say things are changing fast. Asm.js looks pretty cool. The number of game development libraries seems to be exploding and some seem to be getting quite good. If/when I write a second game I may move over to one of them. I think I am over the I want to hack out a gaming library moment I had. People are starting to make money. For now it seems smaller devs are going the licence their game to portals. Anyone who has heard of flash games will know this model. It seams mobile is a big deal - not a surprise. Rumours are Internet Explorer will support webGL, this would be awesome! Much of this is not surprising. What did surpri...