For the past month or two I have been lightly seeding to Cannonade to testers. I have gotten the strong impression that the “fun” of my game was unfortunately getting lost in the low framerate. There is a certain reaction in the human brain that I am trying to evoke by making the blocks explode and collapse in physically realistic ways. However, when the framerate is too low the perception of motion is lost and so is my core game mechanic. I first spent a lot of time optimizing the execution of the Bullet physics engine and found a significant speed increase by tweaking compiler settings. I found that the execution of the physics simulation on iOS devices was very strongly locked to CPU performance. Now the time had come to start attacking the performance of the graphics engine. I was hopeful that I would be able to find even more significant speedups in this area because the graphics engine was custom written by myself and I could also employ device specific optimizations to take advantage of specific strengths or avoid specific weaknesses. Many of the techniques I tried out were nothing that hasn’t already been done before but I thought it would be worthwhile to document my experiences executing them in my specific situation. These are the results of a week and a half of aggressive performance benchmarking, exploration and experimentation. It goes without saying that my results are very data set specific and so they could perform better, worse or the same when applied to a different iOS app.

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the one that gets the most votes below!
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Got a good one that I havn’t thought of yet? Let me know below and I will add it!

UPDATE: Voting is now closed! Looks like it was a 6-way tie! I have decided to deal with this by designing 3 of them, the Gravity Bomb, Fire Bomb and Friction Bomb. Check out their debut in Cannonade 0.5.7!

In evaluating the core fun mechanic of Cannonade, one thing I realized was that a large part of the fun comes from just watching the blocks fall down and fly apart. However, it isn’t enough to have the simulation run and produce natural looking results if the framerate is not high enough to give your brain a good sense of the motion. After seeding Cannonade 0.5.6 and playing a few games with the significantly more complex test castles, it was evident to me that some of the fun was being lost in the low framerate. So I decided to take some time to work on performance now as opposed to further down the road where it usually happens. From the very beginning I knew that the physics performance was going to be a major issue, maybe even the primary bottleneck in Cannonade. I decided to take 2 days to concentrate on nothing but the performance of the bullet physics engine itself. There are many things I could do to lower the amount of work that bullet has to do but ultimately there is always going to be a substantial amount of work that it needs to crunch and so it should be well worth the time to get it to run faster. This is an account of my adventures in this area and my knowledge of the subject at this point.

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Testing out some new explosive weapons in the editor.

So after a month and a half of heavy development I am almost ready to unveil my game to the world and start alpha testing! There are just a few things that need to happen first though, the most important of which is that I need to find a name for this thing!

This game is a creative 3D physics game in which players take turns trying to destroy each other’s fortresses with different weapons and strategies. Players need to be clever in their choice and use of weapons, strike a balance between spending and saving resources, and have a pinch of luck to succeed. Players can even take their game to the next level by creating their own castle designs and pitting them against their friends.

Thematically I have been thinking that I want it to have a light-hearted, silly and fun tone to it but also have tons of big explosions and loud weapons.

So what should such a game be called? (pick up to 5)
Got an idea for name? Let me know in the comments!

UPDATE: Voting is now closed. I have decided to go with Cannonade! Thanks for your input everybody!

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The biggest problem I see with the current implementation (iOS 4.x) of Game Center is that there is no way for Game Center users to authenticate themselves to 3rd-party servers. Let me explain from the top. Game Center is Apple’s new games oriented social network and infrastructure on iOS devices. It has a lot of great features like leaderboards, achievements and matchmaking. Once a user creates an account on an iOS device they are perpetually signed in at the operating system level. This is great because it means that all existing and future Game Center games can take full advantage of its features, social connectivity and never have to make users create an account (users HATE creating new accounts) or even sign in again (unless of course they explicitly sign out). From the game developer perspective, Game Center is really awesome. There are a lot of developers (myself included) who do not want to have to:

• Create a complete login infrastructure
• Store and handle people’s passwords safely
• Figure out some sort of account confirmation
• Implement password recovery
• Encourage users to start building YET another social graph on your service/game
• Handle other support related support requests

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The entrepreneurial itch has gotten me once again! After nearly five years with Apple I have decided it is time for a new adventure! In many ways I think I prefer to be the big fish in the small pond. As far as the startup life is concerned, there has already been so much said by so many that I don’t think I have anything particularly insightful to add other than that it is indeed an absolute rush.

The first time I went out on my own was right after college. For two years I developed an extensible 3D interface framework and window server called Vision. It is no longer in development but you can still check out material on it in the Archives (I might get a patent out of it yet though). Even though things didn’t turn out like I had hoped, I still wouldn’t trade that time for anything! I learned a TON during that period of my life in all sorts of areas. The technical skills and business knowledge that I acquired during that time have proven to be invaluable in everything I have worked on since. The lessons I learned have also shaped my plans for this next go around.

The first thing I decided to do this time was to start small and build up. I am going to attack small problems/projects with the goal of getting some sort of sustainable revenue quickly. These small projects are the kind that one person can bring to market by themselves. Because of the small scale I also plan to not seek funding and bootstrap everything myself. That way there really is nothing standing in the way of getting a fully finished product out the door other than my own skill and effort. Hopefully I will be successful enough to bring others on board and attack progressively bigger problems.

I have already laid the plans out for my first project which will be introduced in a future post. I will say that it is an original iOS game like nothing currently in the App Store today. My plan is to take this first month to code up what I would comfortably call a playable alpha and start organizing a testing community around the game. Apple has made such compelling and easy to use development tools/frameworks that it is going to be a joy to dive headfirst into iOS development full-time.

I also plan to regularly document my progress and efforts here for anyone who has interest in independent software development. I know that I particularly enjoy reading about the experiences of other indie developers out there. Got any advice for me? Let me know in the comments!

One of the best third person shooters on the App Store is now on the iPad! Get Caster HD now in all its high resolution glory!

I am seriously excited for the iPad! Hopefully I will be able to get a hold of one soon and check out what may be the future of personal computing.