when you run a company you call the shots

by erik on April 9, 2010

taking the stand


When you are in charge and run a company, you must take the helm and call the shots. While this can apply to any industry, I’m mostly focused on the fresh fallout of Steve Jobs’ / Apple’s new terms and conditions announced yesterday for the new iPhone OS 4.0 which takes the current turf war with Adobe to a new level.

An excellent summary is provided here.

While I’m eagerly anticipating Adobe’s upcoming CS5 software in just a few days, Apple has timed this announcement not only to extend and accentuate the middle finger to Adobe and by extension all Flash content creators, but to remind the industry that when you do business with Apple, you do things Steve’s way.

Apple has set standards and nothing else will cut the mustard.

While the media and Apple fanboys support Steve no matter what he declares, it will be interesting to see how this shakes down in the next few months from other corners of the industry, content creators dealing with all platforms, and customers in general.

How will Adobe respond next week in the CS5 launch? Will they yank any support to MacOSX in response? While some of the “superstar” iPhone developers have crossed the line in protest to join forces with Adobe will this have any impact on the innovation or quality of applications on the iStore?

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results of the flash game market survey 2009

by erik on January 22, 2010

The results of the flash game market survey 2009 commissioned by Mochimedia were recently posted and provides a bit of insight into the “current” state of the Flash game marketplace from both the developer and publisher perspective.

While there were a few interesting slides, overall it seems to coincide with the current state of the downloadable PC games sector of the market; basically you’ve got a large hump of people making next to nothing.

Is there anything to seriously worry about? I don’t really think so. I think it resonates the message that game development of any type; Flash, PC, iPhone, etc. is HARD work with a large number of people not making much money while others are pulling in fistwads of cash.

It’s how you move from the first poor pile to the second rich pile which is everyone’s million-dollar question.

Flash Games Market Survey Results Final
View more documents from mochimedia.

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the 3 best IDE’s for C++ development (plus 1 to avoid)

January 19, 2010

Despite what you read around the various game media websites and/or some of the bleeding edge technology news portals, C++ skills are still in hot demand. To maximize your productivity, I thought I’d put together a list of my own “top 3″ development IDE’s for C++ today. While these picks are just my own personal [...]

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5 reasons for transparent development

December 30, 2009

Transparency seems to be a popular keyword in today’s business environment. While it’s mostly being used in the context of efforts such as policy transparency or financial transparency, I think there’s also plenty of opportunity for game companies to open up development transparency. 1. It helps to stay on the radar. As more content is [...]

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using paint.net to create Team Fortress 2 sprays

December 26, 2009

Here’s a quick tutorial created by our artist Corby Johanneson, on using Paint.NET to create some Team Fortress 2 Sprays. Not only that, he discusses a few of the basic Paint.NET tools such as selections and the magic wand.

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Quality Assurance folks should be among the last to leave

December 11, 2009

Rock Bank publisher MTV Games has released the news that it’s Harmonix subsidiary has terminated the employment of 39 individuals. I understand the growth and contraction of business (and its staff) but it still stinks to read this kind of news. Good luck to the affected, and hopefully they find something better at their next [...]

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iPhone app store PR firm uses MMO gold farming tactics

August 26, 2009

I’m surprised this actually took THIS long to materialize, given the amount of money flowing through the Apple iPhone app store. A company called Reverb Communications uses a farm of interns who trawl the internet posting reviews and comments on applications by their clients. It’s a brilliant strategy honestly, driven because of the “hit chart” [...]

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torn between single player and browser experiences

August 11, 2009

As I move the company forward into Q4 of 2009 and leading into Q1 2010, I have to get better at sticking to my company roadmap. My interests and skillset is extremely diverse, which can sometimes put a damper on real progress in terms of “shipped games”. Over the past 2 weeks, I’ve been migrating [...]

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configuring Eclipse for SDL

August 9, 2009

This post details the necessary steps for configuring Eclipse to compile SDL projects on Windows. Install MinGW The MinGW installation brings some of the tools we need to help us make Eclipse more effective, as well as providing a cross-platform cohesion with the MacOSX environment. Navigate to MinGW.org In the downloads area, you’ll find the [...]

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perspective vs. orthographic projections (aka. 3d vs. 2d)

August 8, 2009

To work with graphics programming, we need some mathematics to provide us with a standard reference point from which to position and draw our game objects within a scene. During the process of crunching down all the vertex data, the graphics pipeline needs to understand how to present the scene (which is in a 3D [...]

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