When it comes to trying to build something, one of the hardest things to accomplish (at least after actually finishing & releasing the darned thing), is trying to do it within your means.

Things have been a little busy lately (especially with GCAP 2013 having just wrapped up) - hence the silence lately.

Now it’s a bit more under control though - here’s the brief low-down on a few things which have been happening as of late in my little indie developer world. Truth be told, I’ve spoken about this stuff to varying degrees elsewhere, but it’s nice to have it centralised here as well :)

I just read this piece on sustainable software pricing in the Mac App Store by one of the developers at Realmac Software.

I agree with it a heck of a lot.

Failure feels utterly exhausting.

Looking at a project you’ve put just about every ounce of energy into, to watch falter at launch, with every attempt you make at reaching out - to press for reviews, to friends & peers for feedback, and even amongst the wider scene.

Looking back at everything I’ve done wrong to get Pocket Dogfights out the door, it feels like I’m just asking myself questions I can’t answer.

When resurrecting this blog a few months ago, I swore to myself I’d try to avoid posting rants as much as possible. I guess I could only pull that off for so long, but, sometimes, the need arises to make a rant or so :)

In this case: Passion. Or the place of one’s passion in the wider scheme of things.

For me, that of course is about project development - games, applications & other things. For obvious reasons, the last few months has been more games focused, as I released Pocket Dogfights, and worked on the messaging and support of the game. Considering that for most of this time, the game was my primary source of income - it shouldn’t be unreasonable for me to have been pushing it as hard as I did :)

Which does beg me to ask - does that sound reasonable to you? It’s one thing if you’re not into gaming (which I won’t hold any hard feelings against), but if you have an honest to goodness problem with me being passionate about this - then I have to say that I feel like you’re part of the problem.

There’s some 7 billion of us on this planet. We’re all going to be passionate about different fields, about different interests. Providing one’s passions are in a field that isn’t making the world worse, then there’s no need to get worked up over them!

Finding yourself annoyed by someone posting about their passions which don’t interest you? Maybe time to take Wheaton’s Law into effect & Don’t Be A Dick about it.

Just something small which might help make the world just a little bit nicer, and remove just a little bit of negativity - and if we can do that bit, by bit - maybe the world will be just that bit better off.

For every developer, there is always the difficult decision about how much support needs to be given to an app, or a game, or any type of project. Finding the right time to deprioritise work on a project - in order to have bandwidth available for a new project, or for something else is always going to be a loaded decision.

With the public release of iOS 7 less than a week away (at least at the time of writing), it’s now prime time to get updates of your iOS apps into the App Store so they’re all good on the new hardware.

When it comes to dealing with games built in Unity, you’ll find the biggest issue is simply getting used to the changes which Xcode 5 brings to the table. This guide covers what you’ll need to be aware of in terms of tweaking the Xcode project you get out of Unity to allow it to submit to the store successfully.

When I’d originally heard of the whole idea behind #c64month, I couldn’t help but be utterly excited. I mean - an entire month dedicated to (what I think is) the greatest 8-bit microcomputer ever? HECK YEAH.

Whilst I’d have loved to have tried to put something together - my 6502 skills are just a little rusty at this stage, so instead - as I’m in a bit of a reflective mood, primarily to do with trying to work out what I want to work on for my next project now Pocket Dogfights is basically at a stage where I’m focusing on minor maintenance work, I thought I’d go back and take a look at a few games which happen to have been some form of influence on me.

Whether it’s just because I can appreciate what they did with the hardware, or they have systems which impressed me on a number of levels - they’re just a small list of a few that I thought were interesting on a number of levels.

When it comes to bring a game (or application) out, there’s always going to be the question about ports. Whether it comes up during development, or the point after you get it out the door and into the player’s hands - it’s bound to come up sooner or later.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted about the initial plans for controller support in the next update to Pocket Dogfights. With a bunch of work for it complete, and other work still pending, I thought I’d put together a little update piece just to cover what is happening, and when things will tick over into the next phase.

Unlike the previous release, I won’t be aiming to release these at the same time, but rather as they’re finished. The main reason for that, is that there’s a lot of platform specific work to test this time, as I want to get each one tested and released in turn.