360iDev Success

360iDev in San Jose was a blast!  I had the great fortune to be the lead off keynote speaker and got a great reaction to my message to the developer community.

Here is a mention of this part plus a subsequent interview with me on TUAW.

As usual 360iDev delivered a great line up speakers (both the big draws like Saurik and Keith and Natalia, and Mr. Doodle Jump himself Igor Pusenjak, and a good PR talk from Chris Heintz) and several new speakers.  Was every talk a knock-out?  No, there are always some duds in a thing like this.  But that's okay.  You expect them to not only bring you the great speakers but also audition new ones to seek out fresh blood and new ideas.  This last bit is a key mechanism for bulding out a bull pen of new pitchers.  If this didn't happen you'd never get any new stars, and nothing new to learn.

Like the first 360 I went too, I found this show to be a complete blast!  The people are great, and you get a sense of community and common purpose like no other show I can think of.  I love myself some GDC iPhone Summit and others, but it's 360iDev that seems to have mastered the layed back attitude that I enjoy.

Nuking the Developer Ecosystem

The big topic of dicussions was the recent changes to the iPhone/iPad developer agreement and the new features in the upcoming 4.0 OS.  Both of these things have had a dramatic impact on the middleware ecosystem that surrounds iPhone development.  With popular 3rd party middleware platforms ranging from OpenFeint to Unity3D either usurped by Apple directly or potentially disallowed by edict, the mood at the show was certainly on edge.

I hosted an impromptu session at 360iDev so middleware vendors and developers could hash this new world out some.  The Corona team was there in force and very forthcoming about their views of their ongoing business.  Some others, who were invited and said they'd show, didn't (I'm looking at you Jason).  This added to the sense that not all was well in the world.

There's been a lot written about this on the intertubes of late.  Most of it about if tools like Unity3D, Furry or various ad servering platforms do or do not violate the various new rules.  But all of this discussion entirely misses the point.

The problem is that we're even having this discussion.

Think of it this way: If you are an iPhone game developer, you use to have a lot of options for what tools you might to use.  Unity3D is an obvious one.  But now, in this new world order, you have to ask yourself what the risk is of using such any tool that isn't XCode.  Does the new developer agreement language outlaw such tools?  The uncertainty is scary enough, but the real problem is that even if you come to the conclusion that it doesn't you then have to wonder about if they'll outlaw it in the future.  Afterall, Apple has shown that it's definitely willing to do this sort of thing for whatever reasons it has at any time it chooses, without warming or perhaps even explaination.

I maintain a list of tools for iPhone/iPad developers here.

If your company makes iPhone middleware then you are probably scrambling to figure out what's going on.  Worse, you are also have to be looking at how you can adapt to a new business model really fast.  OpenFeint has one such solution with its OpenFeint X microtrans layer (since the basic features of OpenFeint itself will be susurped by Apple's Game Center stuff).  But what good does that do them when Apple might just add these features to the Game Center stuff in some subsequent release?

Imagine if you are a enterprising entrepreneur who's been excited by the opporuntities Apple has made for us in the iPhone/iPad space, and you have an idea for some new middleware platform to enable developers to do something cool, more efficient, cross-platform or what have you.  Does it make sense to invest your sweat and coin in such an undertaking when Apple has shown that it has no problem just invalidating your entire bussiness model with no warning at all?

Could you get any institutional money for such a venture?  What VC would look at these developments and not figure your idea carries a pretty scary risk profile?

The bottom line is that these moves by Apple has created a palpable chlling effect on the entire middleware eco-system for iPhone/iPad development.  No one argues that they do not have the right to do this.  There are some big strategic issues at play here for Apple.  The real question is if they realized the impact on the developer ecosystem when they did this.  Is this collatoral damage?  Do they realize how bad it could really be?  Or was this acceptable losses, or even entirely intentional?  Were they a bull in a china shop or a steel-nerved sniper?

And just how far does the damage go?  As the organisers of 360iDev pointed out to me, essentially all of their sponsors are affected by this and may not exist the next time the show comes around.  Will the impact be a ripple or a tsunami?

I am a huge Apple supporter and a aggressive evangalist of becoming a developer on this platform.  My admiration of what they have created here is well documented.  But I fear that swinging a hamfisted hammer around the developer community could lead to a backlash that ultimately undoes it.

Does that seem extreme?  Pure hyperbole?  Am I blowing it out of proprotion? Consider there was a time when Sony owned the console business and it was inconcieveable they'd ever be unseated.  They were also known for bullying their developers and when something came along that was more developer-friendly, they were eager to move on.

Apps are what makes the iPhone/iPad valuable.  Apple knows this.  Just look at their commercials.

And developers make the Apps.

Say what you will about Microsoft, but they wouldn't have done this.  Combined with an upcoming product that looks like it might be a winner, and if they implement their marketplace correctly, their developer-centric attitude will give them an edge that might matter.  Perhaps before what happened here I would have been inclined to just say "too little, too late" to Microsoft, but Apple has just given them an opporutnity (however slim) to make a move.

If this comes to pass we might be at the moment we look back on and can say this is where Apple blew it.

I hope not.

Yeah. I have a real love/hate thing with open source.

Oh, not the idea of it, that I unequivocally love. But the reality of it can sometimes be another matter.

I use open source, don't get me wrong. I've released stuff into open source. And like the internet itself, when it's used for good... it's great. When it's used for evil... it's EVIL.

This site, for example, runs on Drupal. And Drupal is open source, and it has vulnerabilities. These get patched, but the act of patching sets of this nice little cascade:

1. Drupal announces patches to fix security problems
2. Hacks look at what was fixed (readme + diff of source) and figure out exploits with little effort required
3. Software scans Google looking for Drupal sites and then auto-hacks each one it finds

This all happens moments after a security patch is released. And before poor site operators can react to it. This site was one to get hit, and not only was a phishing exploit installed on it, but Google detected it and (helpfully or not) blacklisted Critical Thought Games as a phishing site.

Sigh.

Naturally I've corrected the problem, and requested they remove me from their list... but I have no idea how long that'll take. In the meantime, anyone coming to my site will be told I'm a big fat security risk. In the sense I use Drupal (or anything like it), I guess tht would be generally true.

But it's only true because of open source. The argument is that Open Source projects would be more secure because you have more eyes looking at the code. That theory is not backed up by the realities on the ground. The realities on the ground is that Open Source platforms get used a lot, and that means that a single exploit can be leveraged into hacking hell of a lot of sites in one go. Whereas a site that is all proprietary code means that exploiting it is probably a one-shot deal for the hacker. The laws of economics are at work here. Unless that one site is big, like a Amazon or something, it's not worth messing the effort relative to a sweeping hack of all one-rev behind Drupal, Joomla or whatever sites.

Open Source, in practice, can sometimes really suck. But since I knew this was a possibility going in, I can't claim it was anyone's fault by my own.

I just now submitted geoSpark v1.1.1 update to Apple.  We got a lot of feedback and worked to make the game more interesting and add new stuff.  In fact, we plant to continually add new stuff so long as people want it!  Honestly I think we really fine tuned the game play here... adding in more randomness and the new sparks, with their unusual behaviors, make for a lot of fun.  The 1UP special gives you second chances if you can catch it!

geoSpark Version 1.1.1 What's New!

• 4 new Sparks with all new behaviors!
• A new rare Special Spark (1UP)
• Spark spawns have significantly more variety to them now!
• New High Score Leader Board specifically for v1.1
• New "longest chain" Leader Board
• OpenFeint Achievements!  Earn OpenFeint Points!
• More sound effects (and improvements to some old ones)
• Backdrop "red shifts" as it speeds up
• Slightly modified the Slow Special Spark (slows a % now)
• Some bug fixes

This version adds a lot to the later game, for all you reaching for the big scores.

The new sparks provide a wicked twist on gameplay that you'll have to discover as you go.

The new 1UP Special Spark comes out rarely, but it gives you the ability to survive a clash and keep going!

We honed the gameplay even better this version through careful balancing of randomness with difficulty progression. This is particularly significant in games where you survive to see some of the new Spark behavior!

I woke up to the most amazing news...

Apple: geoDefense Best Game of 2009

Apple has named geoDefense a Best Game of 2009 in their Rewind 2009 Awards!  I was so estatic I couldn't figure out who to tell first... though most people knew even before I woke up...

But before i could do anything, before I could even really take in that news, I got hit with this:

TIME: geoDefense Swarm Best Video Game of 2009

TIME Magazine's Best of Everything 2009 names geoDefense Swarm a best video game of 2009.  And I'm not talking best iPhone game here, I'm talking Best Video Game with the likes of Modern Warfare 2 on the list!

I can't tell you all how incrediable this feels.  Every since I was a knee high to a keyboard, and back then having a computer was a rarity to be sure, I've been making games.  Heck that's been my pasion personally and professional since as far back as I can remember.  

I trace it to my brother Richard actually.  You see I was a late child, being born some 20 odd years after my siblings.  So I sorta grew up an only child, but I still had a wonderful brother and sister.  And my brother was a gamer... we're talking strategic board games, Avalon Hill yo!  If you don't know what those are, then hit the google.  Point is, they were intense and complex and my brother would like to play them with me.  He was a little kid and he an adult and he'd mop the floor with me.  When we played Star Fleet Battles he called my ship the USS Swiss Cheese.  Get the picture?

He never took it easy on me.  Or if he did, I still couldn't come close to beating him.  It tooks years of this before I was able to best him in a game.  And I'll never forget that day!  But something else happened too; I decided the best way to beat him at a game was to make my own games.  Especially since Avalon Hill games had manuals that were like novels and just knowing the rules, much less mastering the tactics, was just out of reach.  I made some board games of my own; paper and pencil style.  You could even buy blank counters like they used in those games and I'd make my own units with colored pencil.

And then the fateful day came when I walked into a Radio Shack and say a TRS-80 Model I.  Like duck to water.  Like bee to honey. That was that.

I'd be horribly remiss to not express my never-ending gratitude to Apple, the leadership of Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller in making the App Store what it is today.  Forget the grousing, what they are doing is very hard and there's going to be snafus along the way.  Focus instead on the greatness of what they've accomplished.  They've built an amazing channel where indie developers can compete head-on with the likes of EA-sized giants and come out on top.  It's a new Golden Age for game development.  And even after a year, no one else can seem to figure out how to do an App Store even close to right (hint: all they have to do is copy Apple, they've been showing the way!).

A special shout-out and thank you to my team at TriplePoint PR who continue to make sure everyone knows what I'm up too.  Without them, this would not be possible.  If you make great iPhone games, talk to these guys.  Now.

And of course thanks to all my fans!  Wait to you see what I do in 2010!

(And thank you Richard.... the USS Swiss Cheese is back!)

Much quicker than expected (thank you Apple) geoSpark pop'd out of the review oven!

Grab it here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/geospark/id337662397?mt=8

I've yet to make a web page for it, so forgive me while I catch up.  Usually review takes so much longer!

For all your geoDefense fans, keep in mind that geoSpark is a much more casual experience than my Tower Defense games.  This one is a collaboration with Imangi Studios and is aimed squarely at those who want a quick casual experience with a lot of geoDefense-like visual zazz! 

And don't worry... more geoDefense goodness is on the way too.  But that's for another post.  For now, drink in these screen shots!

I've gotten a lot of people asking me what's going on lately.  Things seem quiet!  Do I still live?

Mostly, yes.  Of course the Month of October was a big vacation month for me.  Spent time in Bali, meet my Girlfriends parents, things like that.  But for those following on Twitter, I was working on GD and GDS from the beach even then!

As many of you know, I'm also the President and CEO of Simutronics Corp and we are in the last quarter of a big develop project.  Things are getting intense.  It's a Facebook game, but one that's more our style than the typical FB fare.  Some have said this is insanity since all FB players like is clicking on plots of land on farms or ordering hits on people.  Maybe, but I also remember when people said geoDefense was too hardcore for the iPhone crowd. :)

geoDefense Updates!

Don't worry, there is still much going on.  Both GDS and GD are getting updates.  Bug fixes and the latest OpenFeint (and all the features therein).  I'm also adding in-app pruchasing of level packs to both.  In the case of Swarm, we are finishing up the first level pack now which has 10 all new levels in it (5 med / 5 hard).  From time to time I plan on free new levels in updates too, but this system lets me compensate my level builders and, if all works out, increase the number of new levels that can be created.

I hope to wrap this up this month.

Need More Ham!

In other news, while I was away, the forums here got slammed by spam bots.  (sigh)  I cleaned up a lot of it, but more importantly I've invested in some more powerful spam-fighting tech.  So far it has worked (fingers crosssed).

You can see the results of it working here:

New Product: geoSpark!

Most of my CTG time has been spent on a new title: geoSpark.  This game is being done in collaboration with Imangi Studios.  I've mentieond it a few times before.  Right now we're in the final phases of polishing it up.  The gameplay is done and we're getting the menus and other widgets in there.  I'll post more about this as soon as I submit!

 I had the great fortune to be a guest on TouchArcade's latest podcast.  Great bunch of guys... we had a blast.  Be sure to check it out here.

You'll also notice the announcement of a new game.  I've teamed up with the amazing folks at Imangi Studios to create a new game: geoSpark.  Check out the podcast for a preview and a movie!

I'll be posting more information on geoSpark here soon.  But for now, focusing on getting the latest fixes out for geoDefense Swarm.

Let me just be clear about one thing here: 360IDev was the best conference I've been too in a very, very long time.  There was no single thing that made it so outstanding, but rather a gestalt. Oh sure... it had great sessions, great talks, some amazing information and all that.  Even the served food was quite good!

But that wasn't it.

What made 360IDev so great was the people.  And I'm not just talking about the friends I made there... though that was especially precious.  But I'm talking about everyone as a whole.  Because what I saw at 360IDev is something I haven't seen in about 15 or 20 years.  It's a bit hard to describe... but what I liken it too is the early days of the Game Developers Conference.  Back when it was small, eand the people were all there with a singleness of purpose and the people who put it on were as gracious and helpful as they could be.

To be blunt, the conference was not dominated by stuffed suits, not dominated by nonsense, not dominated by people hawking stuff... there wasn't even a single prima donna in sight!  People were there to learn from each other, help each other, and band together to achieve their ambitions.  The sense of community, which I feel the whole game industry lost so long ago, was a constant at this conference.  It was, I realized by the second day, home.

This industry will evolved too, and much nonsense will invade over time.  But for the moment, my special thanks to Tom and John for putting on one hell of a conference.  Every iPhone dev needs to be at the next one, without question.

I gave a well-received talk.  Blew a few minds, changed some attitudes and showed a few receptive minds the light and the way.  At least I was told I did.  Okay, I'll be a tad immodest: I'm pretty good at the whole speaking thing.  And this was far from my A-effort (because I had little time to prepare) but I think I got the job done.  And, in some way, I hope I showed a lot of people not only what it was they really needed to be focusing on but also tried to reset the stage a bit.

The enthusiasm one felt from this crowd was fantastic.  The people who had done well with the App Store were giving of their time and advice.  And everyone was there to have a great time and just be spontaneously creative and productive.  I saw genius just for genius sake.

But I saw one other thing too, a dark thing that needed to have some light cast upon it.  It was the usual grousing.  All of it, of course, focused on Apple. More specifically the App Store, the approval process, and so forth.

Well you know what?  I think, I hope... I gave people some perspective at the show.  I know I got through to a few at least.

Because what Apple has done here is nothing less than amazing: They have ignited a new Golden Age of indie game development.

While there I had the opportunity to tell the story of my close friend and brilliant programmer John Ratcliff who, when I first met him, was doing hit games for EA from his basement.  This was 20 years ago, back when EA was not the megacorp it is today.  They relied on small indie developers like him to build games and grow their business.  He created such hits as 688 Attack Sub and Seawolf for them.  Essentially alone.  In his basement.

And he made great royalty money too... buying exotic cars, building a big house so so forth.  He was (and still is) famous in the game development world.

Alas, times change.  EA game projects today have credit lists a hundred names long it seems!  Big gambles, big risks, big payoffs, big disasters.  It's a whole different industry but one thing is for sure: the age of the lone-wolf developer had ended.

And, 20 years later, Apple....  Steve Jobs....  and his team....  Brought. It. Back.

While so many focus on the small things, like the whole Google Voice rejection mishigoss, it seems everyone has lost sight of the most amazing transformation of the gaming industry in my lifetime.  Not just amazing by what it has achieved, or what it will achieve going forward, but the pace at which this has occurred!  The old vets of the App Store game have about 1 year of experience!

Take a moment and think about what this means.  About the magnitude of this accomplishment.

Sure, it's awkward that Apple owns the distribution channel, and that your fate often rests in their decision to bless you with promotion or not.  But that was also true when AOL was the primary online aggregator and you were doing online games (pre-internet ya'all!).  This is not entirely unprecedented.  It's a trade off.  And as was pointed out at one of my panels, it's like the bargain share croppers take on... you get to farm on fertile land.  Apple makes it fertile to the tune of 50 million users and a one-touch solution for buying your apps and sending you money!

As Apple sells more and more iPhones and iPod Touches, at ever lower prices the market just expands.

I was confronted by the fact that many devs feel a tad helpless in the face of the blizzard of apps appearing on the store each day.  They feel their app is just lost in the wind, and there isn't much they can do about it.   Fortunately many of the talks at 360IDev focused on this very subject, including mine.  But even still, there seemed to be an undercurrent of "this isn't fair!"

They are right: it isn't fair.  But more to the point, it isn't supposed to be fair!

I will repeat the point I tried to drive home at the conference:

What Apple has done here, what Steve Jobs has done here, is he has stepped up to each and everyone of us and handed us a bat. Stepping aside, he says to us "Swing away!"

For Americans anyway, we should all recognize this because it's part of our culture as a country; our prime founding principal: Opportunity.  There are no guarantees of a hit app but rather we have been given the opportunity to have one.  Apple has made it possible for a lone wolf developer to compete in the same channel as EA, and win!

If you have the talent, the know-how, the drive, the ambition, then you should be swinging for the fences.  It's not a Lottory; it's not luck.  It's about focus, determination and skill.

So, for all of the budding iPhone developers out there, I say this:

Steve has handed you the bat.

Now... what are you going to do?

Yesterday the geoDefense 1.4 Update hit the App Store!  Apple got the review done in blazing fast fashion... those guys rock!

I'm about to head down to do my 360IDev talk.... If you are attending 360IDev, see you there!

The 1.4 Update to geoDefense is currently in beta testing and I hope to submit it here shortly.

Unfortunately the 1.3 Update to geoDefense was not very smooth.  First there was the icon artwork issue that took down all the geoDefense games and the Update for most of the evening.  But that has nothing to do with the fact that I let some bugs slip through in the 1.3 Update.  Here's what happened:

The game levels in geoDefense are specified in XML format.  Nothing wrong with that.  But the parsing of the format is done through frameworks that are supplied by the iPhone's OS.  Somewhere along the line, I think the 3.0 update, the XML parser got more strict.  What this means is that levels that had typos and other minor mistakes in the XML use to parse okay, but under the new parser, do not.

In particular, they cause the parser to abort prematurely.  Here is an example:

<creeps waveHealthFactor="1.1" waveHealthFactor2="0.1" waveWealthFactor="1.6" waveSpeedFactor"1.1">

The typos is the missing = between waveSpeedFactor and "1.1".  Under the old parser this would just be ignored.  It means the level was not playing the way we specified, but since play testing determines fitness of a level... that sort of thing just slipped by.

Under the new parser, this causes the whole XML parsing oepration to abort.  And, unfortunately, my code did not correctly check for parsing errors (since the old one never seemed to throw them, I never noticed). 

Half loaded levels lead to lots of bizzare stuff... usuallly a crash. But you can get it in other strange states as well depending on what other levels you  might have played first.

Essentially my spot testing of levels was entirely inadequate, and for that I apologize.

I've since corrected the mistakes in the level files, and I've hardened the code against this sort of thing.  One unfortunate side effect of this is that the affected levels will have their highscores cleared on the next update... but only those levels (M6, M9 and M11).  I'll also reset it in OpenFent on that update to get things back in a reasonable state.