Officially, this is being written right about the half-way point of the year. It feels odd how it’s gone by so incredibly fast, and by consequence, the fact that it’s just shy of 3 months since Pocket Dogfights went live as well.

I plan to waffle a bit more about that (in particular, getting a proper post-mortem post together) in the short term, but for now, I’m very focused on getting the 1.10 release out the door. I had originally hoped to have that done by PAX Australia, but I think that won’t be the case (thank the Jet Lag I’ve been suffering since I returned home). I’m aiming to get an early pass of it for beta testing this week - and submitted for iOS/Android/OS X as soon as I can.

With that done however, what’s next for PD? Honestly, I think it’s time to put it into maintenance mode, with the focus on keeping it running on newer iOS/Android/OS X versions and maybe bringing it to some other platforms. After almost two years working with this codebase, I feel like it’s time to move on - especially as the sales numbers just aren’t there.

On one hand, I feel like this is a great time to do some major toying around with what’s coming up in iOS 7 - the fact of the matter is, iOS development has paid the bills for a long time, and whilst it’s been a bit of a gap (primarily to get PD out the door), I need to get myself back on track there in the short term so I can continue to pay the bills.

I also really want to take the time to get my feet wet with the game technologies announced. It might be a crazy proposition in my head, but aiming to use them to create a small arcade-style game in time for the iOS 7 launch is a good way to possibly get a few more hits on the store (and also a nice marketing point to use). Whilst that technical decision might dissapoint some, the fact is - the majority of my sales are from Apple platforms, so it makes it a proposition worth investigating. Plus, if it’s a small enough project - hopefully there won’t be too much wasted if it happens to fail.

I do hope to blog about that project (whatever form it takes) as I start developing it. Obviously, for reasons of the NDA, I’ll be limited in what I can talk about - so it’ll likely be about gameplay & design over technical matters. Though, I do hope to revise that once the NDA eventually goes away.

That’s really about it. Focusing on this one last fix release, starting to design something small for a possible iOS 7/OS X Mavericks launch, and finding work to pay the bills. Plus fitting in PAX - which is only as an attendee… but should be fun all the same.