Fluttermind

All Men, Great and Small

2011-10-13T09:23:00.001-07:00

Prologue: I apologise in advance for the repeated use of the term 'Great Man'. In the spirit of this little musing, it is not meant to be sexist but the common term used to denote a historically significant, great individual. There are/have been many Great Women, but I didn't want to go down the route of talking about Great Men & Women or Great People as these seem less emotionally resonant than the - admittedly rather patriarchal - term used herein.

Greatness
In the wake of Steve Jobs' passing I find myself, like many, musing over a world minus a Great Man. This isn't Apple-fanboyism, but a simple statement of fact; however flawed or odious one may find Apple's working practices, it cannot be denied that Mr Jobs was a key part of Apple's image, their development mindset and vision. If we must admit that Apple is a Great Company (measurably successful, valued by its clients etc.) then it it seems mealy-minded to keep the GM accolade from Mr Jobs himself.

This, in turn, has led to me thinking about others I have met who would willingly don the GM mantle.

[For the record, I am not one, nor do I have any expectations of becoming one. I do what I do fairly well, and enjoy patching up my flaws as I discover them, one at a time. Despite my sympathies for the Randian mindset, I am no Howard Roark. Do not construe this musing as some sort of masturbatory ego-stroking]

I have met many impressive people from different walks of life who either were - or had the potential - to take on the GM title. It strikes me that they share a number of common traits. Others have studied this subject in great detail: there are many MBA case-studies in prestigious universities across the globe on exactly this subject.

This is a personal blog (or collection of musings) so don't expect too much research. Think of it as 'Bloke Down Pub Said This' and we'll all be fine.

I believe the attributes shared by all Great Men are (in no particular order): Confidence, Intellectual Honesty, Clarity. These might not mean what you think they mean in this context, so let me elaborate.

1) Confidence
This is the ability to make a mistake, understand it, learn from it, and not be crushed by it or allow it to define ones personality. Successful entrepreneurs all have an elastically enthusiastic ability to bounce back from even the most disastrous business ventures without it harming their mental health. I believe this requires a certain amount of delusional thinking - but no more so than its opposite, where every tiny failure or misfortune is seen as a personal indictment of ones value. Without confidence, one cannot convincingly lead, and without leadership one cannot be Great, but merely Good.

2) Intellectual Honesty
By no means am I suggesting that good businessmen are scrupulously honest. They are no more so than good poker players.

In this context, what I mean is: having the ability to ask the right questions and answer them honestly - without biasing the answer toward the path of least resistance. In the case of Apple, it seems to come down to repeatedly asking:

"What do people really want?" and "Is this good enough yet?"

Jobs was notorious for forcing his most talented staff to return to the proverbial drawing board. My guess is that each time this occurred, stress and fatigue levels in the staff-members involved were high enough for them to have stopped asking these questions of themselves.

Being honest about your own work is hard - especially at the end of a long development cycle... or even a tough week. When you are the poor bastard doing the actual graft, weariness is going to affect your judgement on occasion. Welcome to being a human being.

Great Men can retain an element of Intellectual Honesty denied to their staff; partly due to doing all this work by proxy. This is not a criticism, but a nasty, professional fact.

3) Clarity
By Clarity, I do not mean knowing every aspect of what you want from the very first moment. This is usually impossible. However, if you are able to answer the (right) questions you have asked honestly, you know the key things you are looking for in your staff/product.

If you know that 'The Thingy' has to be easy to use, you have a clear mental model of the user, their ability level, and - when faced with design decisions - can imagine how that individual would react to the product. Clarity requires that the key ideas behind the product are known, and in some way measurable.

If you are designing a game that is meant to be a fun puzzle game, then it must have puzzles. And be fun. These sound vague - but they are not. If you start asking the right questions, these things become very precise quite quickly.

a) Fun for whom?
b) What sort of puzzles?
c) How difficult?
d) What happens if the answer from a) alters the values for c)?
etc.

In the case of Incoboto, I know the answers to these questions. It took a lot longer than I planned to get there, but I muddled my way toward the end and discovered the answers. I wish I had spent more time at the beginning of the project focusing on these 'big picture' questions and achieving the necessary clarity. It would have made my life considerably more pleasant.

Falling From Grace
Back to Great Men (rather than 'small, strange games').

Along with those blessed with the potential to be GM I also know of those who seem to fundamentally fail on one or more of those three points, yet still believe themselves to be GM. The result - rather sadly - is not merely a Good Man, but something far worse. The stresses caused by attempting to fulfilling the points beyond their reach seems to cause the others to warp: sometimes into something very nasty indeed.

With no confidence, one cannot lead. With no leadership, clarity is muddied (if not for you, then for the team) and honesty is eventually swapped out for expedience.

With no honesty, the foundations of confidence are shaky, and clarity is merely a straw man waiting to be unpicked by rivals, customers or - in some cases - the team itself.

With no clarity, confidence mutates into arrogance, and honesty is shoved aside to make room for ego. The Small Delusional Man merely stumbles on to the next ill-conceived project having learned nothing.

Big Jobs
Someone once said to me that remaining in an environment inimical to ones nature devours the soul and leaves nothing but a 'hungry ghost'. It's a colourful metaphor, but I can see exactly what was meant.

I have met some people who claim they want to be writers (who never write), designers (who never design), musicians (who never write or perform music). Their problem is that they miss the point: the title is not an end in itself, but a side effect of what you are doing. None have been particularly happy.

There are also those who see becoming a Great Man as an end in itself. They, likewise, have missed the point. It is a by-product.

If I were to don the trappings of a chef, to bully people in my kitchen and constantly lose my temper, it would not make me a better cook.

If I were to grab a guitar and sneer at passers-by while wearing shades, it would not make me a great musician.

This sort of unpleasant behaviour is seen in many Great Men. It is tolerated and often (inaccurately) presumed to be a necessary side-effect of that greatness. This may be true in some cases - if the traits are genuinely due to an honest, clear, confident pursuit of excellence. In these cases, inspiring others to share the ethos still works because the end-goal is clear and desirable to all involved.

If the team's not with you, it's your fault. You've failed in one of the important areas. Bullying won't help.

To those who look at Steve Jobs' more belligerent, unpredictable, and unpleasant behaviour, and use it to validate acting in a bullying, brutish or antisocial manner I offer this piece of advice - from a Small Man:

A dick without Confidence, Intellectual Honesty or Clarity is just a dick. No caveats. No 'but he's always right's to make up for the nasty bits. No 'but look at the results'. Just... dick.

R.I.P. Mr Jobs. May those who seek to follow in your footsteps fully understand your path and not simply mimic your peculiar walk.

Galaxy Map, Tea and Agent Cooper

2011-07-15T04:10:00.000-07:00

Just a quick teaser of info for anyone out there who might be interested.
Here's a screenshot of the game as it currently stands:

In the shot you can see Inco (little guy in helmet) and Helios off exploring a planet featuring Helions (stars) encased in quartz, swingable Grapple-points (huge fun to use), PowerPod generators, MiniPort units, and a computer screen with a message from the Mansonto Corporation apologising for the genocide of all other life in the universe. Fun stuff.

Here's the overall Galaxy Map for Incoboto:

I always find it a huge amount of fun creating maps like this. For me, it's a sort of statement of intent, and a mark of confidence: one of the first things that must be done to make a world 'real'.

Creativity is all arbitrary. Meaningless. If Agent Cooper had preferred tea, he'd have been a different, but equally good Agent Cooper. There would have been Damn Fine Cup of Tea mugs, bumper stickers and other merchandise. People would have said: "Bet he's going to have a cup of tea! That's soooo Cooper." If this seems wrong to you, it is only because you have - as Lynch would put it - eaten the Donut and not the Hole.

You don't get to see what was thrown away. You don't get to experience the alternative universes of potentialities that might have been.

Creative decisions are only made convincing and 'real' by acting as if each decision is correct, and maintaining this for a prolonged period of time. This can be difficult as the many forces that buffet creativity around attempt to alter or influence the constructs you have in your head.

This map may change due to the realities of development, but I'll be sitting here for much of the time looking at this map and by sheer force of magical will, making it as real to my own mind as I possibly can.

First Sightings and the Name Game

2011-05-24T06:08:00.000-07:00

First Sightings

Went to BAFTA a week or so ago and took Inco with me. I had a vague intention of showing it to a couple of people I knew - more from a sense of 'this is what I've been doing with my time' than from a PR message point of view. Having not shown it to anyone other than family and friends before I was a little nervous.

Incoboto is a bit of a weird game. Trying to describe it is quite hard: 'Mario meets Portal meets Ico meets... um... Flaboo? No, you really have to feel it all together with the art and the music and Helios' weird dialogue and... oh, I give up.'

Thankfully, the people who saw were:

a) Lovely folk I liked working with in the past
b) Kind to someone clearly utterly uncomfortable demoing their work

The good news is they seemed to like it. Seeing people struggling with one or two of the controls gave me some really valuable feedback and now the controls have been tweaked to 'playable at social gathering after alcohol' level.

After Kara (my wife) gave me a good kicking the other week for wallowing in self-doubt and self-indulgent examples of artistic temperament Inco is now on track for getting finished in a reasonable time-span. The current release date is set for around the end of August. As Helios would say: "Woohoo! Where's the coffee?!" Inco wouldn't even gesture. He has no arms.

The Name Game
The one really niggling thing remaining (apart from weeks of content creation and bug-fixing) is the name.

The reality is that this is an iPad game. The iPad store is only really set up to work on searches and thus names people can remember. As a result, Incoboto is probably going to change to something more clearly memorable in the next few weeks. I have a few ideas. None quite fit, but that's the problem with working titles; you grow to love them quite quickly, and they soon become mentally entangled with the game overall.

I can expect a few shocked reactions when the renaming occurs - but that's wonderful. It means people care.

The reason for dealing with this name malarky now is that I'm going to have to produce a promo video relatively soon, showing the promise of this game and why people should be interested. It'll need a firm title by then. The good news is that I'll have to write some more 'music' for it, which is always enjoyable. I had written an entire album for it, but on reflection it got a bit... um... dark and strange.

For those who haven't listened to it before, it's available for free download here.

Enjoy.

Game Changers

2011-02-15T14:49:00.000-08:00

We're Back
It's been a while since the last blog. Incoboto is not gone, nor even resting.

The reason for my silence is simple: I've been very busy sorting the game out. I've begun to adopt the Team Ico approach (no, not take 4+ years to make a game) but to start stripping away elements of the game that aren't engaging or fun, and to highlight and accentuate the areas that are proving to be interesting. As such, two main areas have changed - and they are huge.

Helios?
Incoboto's story has always focused on the two themes of longing for the unattainable and loneliness. Helios, the sun-creature was always a (malevolent) puckish figure, offering you the universe while quietly taking you further away from that which was truly important. Things have changed somewhat.

At one point in development his cheeky little face loomed up from behind a planet and surprised me. I suddenly realised that his central placement in each solar system was nonsensical. He's an enormously appealing character who was in a strangely off-screen role for most of the time. Silly.

I felt this had to be fixed, and thus initially just had him follow you about a bit, mocking you. This in turn pointed out that - far from being a menacing figure - he was actually quite comforting and friendly: indeed, the only friendly thing Inco had seen in his lifetime.

As such, Helios could not stay as he was. Now, Helios is no longer so menacing and has a wide range of powers he puts at your disposal. The player can now draw a lens on the screen by placing two fingers upon it. Helios will guide a beam of light through this lens. In this way the player can discover hidden things, kill off shadow baddies, power up contraptions and ultimately feel that his big glowing friend isn't just there to bob around like some infernal balloon.

Controls - or 'the Hardest Button Two Button'

The game's controls are now completely different, and much better for it. An entirely touch/tap/drag/hold style no-button interface was proving far too taxing for newcomers.

I watched as they failed to grasp the difference between a tap and a press ("How difficult can it be? I said tap! No, that's not a TAP that's a PRESS... and now that's a slide... TAP! TAP, GODDAMNIT!")

As a result, the game now has two buttons; one in each of the bottom corners of the screen. Press the left one and you'll go left. Press the right one and you go right. Press both and you'll jump. No tapping, no hold and release. Just press. Easy to explain.

This left me the entire screen free for the player to use as a 'more interesting interface'. You still pick things up, throw them, draw lenses and drag machine-levers around with the nice little tap and drag interface I developed before, but now it never clashes with the basics of movement.

It's lovely. And it's finished. Hoo-rah.

Scripting
I'm now heavily into the scripting part of the game. I have largely abandoned the total randomisation with which I had planned to populate my world. Imbuing randomness with meaning is very hard indeed.

The game now creates and populates each universe to a very basic degree, but then I go in after and choose where key items and characters go. It's a nice compromise, and I hope it works out as the levels come together over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, here are some screenshots:

Some teaser shots

2010-11-09T10:03:00.001-08:00

Things have been quiet for a while on the blogging front, so I thought I'd share a few bits with folks, just so you know I'm not dead, and nor is Incoboto.

Spy-bots went in today and they're creepy as hell. I'm not yet sure if they clash too much with the general cute feel of the game, but I love their floaty movement. Very, very unnerving. Their little eye-stalks track you, and light up red or green depending if they've acquired you as a target or not. Brrr...

In other news, I'm trying to simplify the interaction at the moment. Up until now, EVERYTHING was a physics object. While my physics system managed perfectly well, the poor player had to contend with hundreds of clickable, draggable, carryable objects any time anything exploded, shattered or... well, did anything, really.

As of now, I'm doing the 'nethack logic' thing. If I can't think of 3 reasons why something should be in the game I'm either adding reasons, or jettisoning the idea off into deep space... or into Helios if that's a more terminal metaphor. Personally, Helios gives me the willies when he's angry:

Not a friendly character when he turns. No, he's not based on anyone I know. Honest.

Where does the time go?

2010-08-25T15:44:00.000-07:00

So it's been a month since my side-tracked rant about gender images in the media... and longer since I've actually posted anything of note regarding Incoboto, so here's where we is at.

I spent some time making weird, droney noises like this. I may use this stuff as music in Incoboto. I may decide it's too 'cold'. We'll see as time goes on.

I've just returned from holiday in Iceland and am currently suffering from post-holiday blues. While there's a lot in Incoboto already, there's a lot to do to make it into a game, let alone polish that game to perfection.

- The movement/interaction/interface is pretty much done.

- I have 'creatures' in the game. They don't do much, but they are flammable. Believe it or not, that's important.

- The physics has been re-vamped yet again. It's now a very peculiar hybrid of verlet integrations and rigid body physics. From a consumer's point of view, this simply means: "I can make windmills you can stand on, turn by hand, chuck rocks at and so on, and it all reacts correctly." Yay! Seeing as my background isn't particularly academic or technical, that's a big deal to me.

So - why the delay?

The problem is that I've a huge feature set, but no actual level demonstrating how this all goes together. As such, I need to make a big choice. Generative, or edited content.

This isn't a game where you 'make stuff yourself', leaving all that lovely creation to the user. My 'meaningful' content has to come from somewhere. I'm loathed to spend another month and a half creating an editor, but the sheer wall of work that is required to generate the content in a non-game-breaking way is really quite scary.

At the moment I'm taking time to think and finish off a few technical bits and bobs that'll lead to a smoother, more polished experience (getting planetary atmospheres and stargates rendering quickly, for example).

Once this is done, I have to face the 'wall'.

As such, I'll post more screenies next time around when there's a game to show rather than a bucket of disparate features. Thanks for your patience.

Now if I can only stop myself playing Battlefield Bad Company 2 multiplayer...

Gender Polemic

2010-07-09T02:29:00.000-07:00

So, I was sitting here working while my housemate was watching the television. An ad-break came on, during which I heard the refrain 'Here come the girls...' My reaction was quite extreme: I think the correct phrase is 'my blood boiled'.

I suddenly realised I had a profound loathing for the false gender-identities projected by the media. While men and women do have slightly different wobbly bits we are fundamentally the same species, and I find myself increasingly annoyed by the fractious, factious way in which gender differences are presented.

It starts when you're a baby. Walk down the infant aisles of any toy shop and you'll see what looks like a tactical battle-map of baby-blue and pastel pink intended to genderise us before we can even figure out where our own toes are.

With these gender lines drawn, childhood sets about reinforcing them. Certain toys are deemed 'appropriate' for certain genders, and parents not-so-subtly nudge their offspring into stereotyped roles in order to ensure their kid isn't pointed out as 'the funny peculiar one' at school and mobbed like a peculiarly hued crow... or a Muslim.

Adulthood offers no respite. Conversely, the situation worsens in relation to our spending power. According to marketing firms and the media, women are superficial, materialistic, overly-emotional airheads who only care about babies, their weight, Davina's hair-style of choice and whether Kerry Fucking Katona is fat/in rehab this week.

Worse, we hear phrases like 'us girls have got to stick together' and 'men are from Mars, women are from Venus'.

Really?

As a bloke I prefer to decide who I spend my time with based on shared values and tastes rather than the fact that we both stand up to pee. I like logical, clear people whose motivations and beliefs are consistent, well-considered and understandable (and preferably geeks in my case).

I imagine a majority of women feel similarly (bar the geeks bit).

Women: next time you hear 'Here come the girls' ask yourself if you feel included in their perfumed, vacuous number. I know a majority of you don't, just like many of us 'guys' aren't obsessed with shaving, football or beer.

We'll love you just as you are.

Physics and Input

2010-07-06T10:15:00.000-07:00

Chuck Rock
So, the last couple of weeks have been a real challenge. My physics work is almost complete, but - as ever - edge cases cause lots and lots of problems. I had rocks that forced you back through 1-way walls, balls that went into a non-decaying orbit when thrown, clouds that made you flip into the air as you approached an edge, objects you could swing off causing the player to enter into a non-decaying orbit, and countless others.

The ultimate problem emerged when I realised the player wasn't gaining mass when carrying objects. My little (as yet unnamed) pal wandered around quite blithely, leaping all over the place with a boulder on his head the size of a small 4x4. It seemed a bit silly. When players walked against the boulder and thus pushed it, it felt suitably massive and rolled sullenly, like an overweight cat being shooed off a couch. However, flagging the boulder as 'carryable' allowed the player to loft the massive object into the air with ease.

I fixed this.

And then I realised why I hadn't fixed it before.

In game design there's a constant fight between realism, expectation and fun. Realistically, you shouldn't be able to move a heavy boulder. However, if you could lift it, you'd expect to stagger under its weight. However, that's no fun.

I realised I was going to have to be a little more binary in my treatment of all this stuff, and figure out why I was letting the player do these things in the first place. I always think that once you get into the psychology of game design, a lot of complicated issues become a little clearer.

So, why am I allowing the player to lift the rock? Because it's fun to carry stuff. Because it's necessary for some quests. Because you can throw rocks, and in order to throw them, you need to be able to carry them. See - all this stuff basically says: "Hey! I'm fun! You can do stuff with me!"

So, in this case I decided - even if it is hard to push a rock - if you can lift it, you can move it around with ease. If you try to throw it, it'll arc just like a small pebble.

'But surely that's nonsense!' I hear you cry.

'No,' I respond. The key is in the 'if you can lift it'. It's impossible for any normal person to lift a fecking great rock. However, if we're saying 'you can lift it' then you're super-strong. The end.

I remember the Halo team talking player expectation in relation to AIs, and how 'grey' rules really don't work. If you can make a squad of baddies run by killing their leader, it better happen every damned time, or else don't bother doing it. It'll just confuse the player.

In my case, if you can lift it, you can carry it. If you can throw it, you throw it in a manner identical to every other item you can throw. No exceptions.

Click, Swipe, Press, um... Lick... uh... Fondle?
Have I mentioned how much I hate on-screen controls? The little virtual joysticks that effectively say: "Sorry - I forgot I was designing for the machine you now hold." I think they're awful, lazy, impractical and fiddly.

However, I really wish I were using one.

At the moment, players can do the following, all by pressing, tapping or swiping the screen.

1) Walk
2) Run
3) Jump
4) Pick up
5) Throw
6) Swing

None of these use on-screen controls, nor the accelerometer*.

Balancing all these things involves careful tweaking of interaction radii, the minimum valid distance for a swipe and the maximum period you can keep your finger on the screen before it decides you're pressing rather than tapping

If you make jumping more responsive then you find stuff you're carrying around sticking to you like pathetic industry execs on a booth-babe. Make jumping less responsive and the merest flick of a finger causes stuff to fly off without your say-so. Watching my wife play the game last night was an exercise in frustration. She fundamentally doesn't understand the difference between 'tap' and 'press', nor how 'make the player jump on a press' simply wouldn't work (because that would mean you couldn't move without jumping first).

That's the thing with casual games - there's a lot of training involved because your audience has not had 10+years of tropes and rules to fall back on when faced with a new control system. It's irritating as hell. At some point I'll just draw a line in the sand and say: "Yup... I know. You don't know how to swipe the screen. Quite how you've managed with your iPhone so far, I don't know, but I think you and I part company here.' I'm thinking of giving away 'Act 1' of incoboto and then selling subsequent chapters, so that people who just can't deal with it don't feel too annoyed.

Despite the eventual training issues, it is working - and relatively well. There are no on-screen controls apart from 'Pause'. When you use the machines on the planets, there'll be no mini-game, GUI or other distraction. You'll be manipulating real, physical objects that spin, slide, rotate and otherwise give you tactile feedback.

It's taking a while, but there's the potential for this to be quite awesome.

Now, where's that bloody rock gone.. ow!

*I tried the accelerometer for a bit and then realised that using one on the iPad is no fun at all - and Incoboto is destined for the iPad at some point. Tilting the iPad makes me feel like I'm drunk while in charge of a vehicle, albeit with less lethality, lifelong guilt and prison sentences.

A Little Less Fog, a Little More Detail

2010-06-15T11:36:00.000-07:00

So What's it All About?
It's been a while since I posted anything on the strange game I'm developing. It has grown quite a bit since the last time I posted. It now looks just like the screenshot - and better. I'm aware that I've not yet stated what the game actually is. I'll rectify that shortly, but first I should lay out what my aims were when I started.

1) Produce the best game on the iPhone... for geeks like me
I've grown rather dissatisfied over the last few months. The iPhone is such an excellent machine, but seems to be used to create nothing but 5-second twitch games (Flaboo! included). It can do so much more. So, rather than whining I decided to do something about it. I'm hoping that Incoboto will be something people can play in short spurts, but which also rewards a long afternoon of play.

I'm also bored with games that offer only a single, repetitive mechanic, or with so little content that there's nothing to discuss with friends between play-sessions. Nethack and Angband provide countless hours of content and fodder for water-cooler discussions despite their primitive appearance. Why doesn't this happen more?

I very much hope Incoboto brings this sense of depth and immersion onto the little machine.

I also want to make a game that doesn't involve killing - or at least not as a casual mechanic. This isn't some hippy vegan doctrine I'm following here. I just feel it's a bit trite and not in keeping with the childlike sense of wonder I want to evoke. More on that later.

2) Provide emotive content without resorting to (too much) dialogue
Since watching countless small animated films and seeing the efforts made by others such as Jason Rohrer (who have done marvellous things with lesser technology at their disposal) I've become increasingly interested in the emotional power of simple images and animation.

Incoboto's story is about wishes, loss, and understanding what's really important in life. Hopefully, with clearly designed characters and appropriate pieces of music, I should be able to wrench the odd tear from the audience.

As ever, David Lynch is on my mind, so along with pathos, I'm hoping to bring a sense of quiet unease into the world of Incoboto. As an example, Helios (the great, grinning sun-thing you saw in the last blog) should appear insane and menacing without ever having to say: "Hey! I'm insane and menacing!" or - god forbid - play a dialogue sample. Bleach.

Less is more. In Incoboto's case -hopefully a lot more.

3) Construct a Mythos
It's been a while since I left Lionhead now, and Fable along with it. I'm very proud that we managed to give players the sense that Albion was a real place. By the end of my time there, my job mostly consisted of being a filter for what was or was not Albiony or Fabley. I also experienced a great deal of frustration when others disagreed, or decided 'nobody would care' if we chose to do something out of character.

Incoboto is all mine. That's an enormous privilege. As such I have an opportunity to craft an entire universe of strange inhabitants, colossal machines, odd devices and mysterious planets.

It is unlikely that someone is going to say, "Helios should, you know, fart. It'll be funny."
Even then, if they do, I can ignore them rather than wishing I had a bottle of Draino to swig from.

What's in a Name?
I've had several people tell me that they don't understand the name 'Incoboto'. Others offer me the advice that nobody will remember it: "What is that... Japanese?".

Both are fair comments. At this precise point in time I don't care. The name is... what the game is. Perhaps that'll change in the next few months, but right now I can't imagine the game being called anything else. I'd be interested to hear how others feel about it - presuming anyone reads these.

Zoom and Rotate
One of the biggest things I'm battling against at the moment is the complexity of building a game with no fixed axis of movement or rotation. The whole universe can spin around you, planets rotate, satellites rotate around those, and you can stand on all of them and jump from one to the other. It's bonkers.

However - with all this fun comes potential nausea and a great deal of difficulty in maintaining a meaningful view of what's going on.

If I don't auto-rotate the camera, jumping on the leaves of a crystal-tree while upside-down feels quite... unnerving.

If I do auto-rotate the camera there's a strange sense of vertigo and a constant feeling that there's no 'up'. That's because there isn't one.

I'm thinking of allowing players to choose their own axis of movement at any time, but also leery of the fact that this adds yet another level of complexity into the controls of an already complex game.

I added zooming out/in today, and it looks fantastic. With any luck it'll go part-way toward fixing the issue.

Next Up...
The next task is to get AIs into the game. Like everything else in this game, there are no off-the-shelf solutions to navigation, and the fact that there's no clear axis of movement will make everything more difficult. So - by next blog, my aim is to have AIs wandering around and able to interact with the player-character. Then it's time for catacombs.

Never Neverland
As a final note, I'm also aware that what I'm trying to do is stupidly ambitious, and that most people fail miserably when they attempt something this big on their own. But then, if people didn't have a go the world would be so dull.

Incoboto Teaser Screen

2010-05-20T04:33:00.000-07:00

I know I shouldn't do this so early, but it helps keep a record of my intent, and - believe it or not - giving an image public wings keeps me motivated.

So here it is: the first teaser screen of incoboto.

I'm trying something completely different, combining physics programming, my interest in generated content, cute-yet-unsettling moods and ambient music.

Game-play is really simple to control but has a lot of complex and chaotic repercussions.

I'm also going to be exploring the space between software-toys and games. Hopefully people will have fun with this even if they don't 'win'.

I'm also going to try and maintain a 'there are no bad things, only less-good things'. It'll be a challenge, but that's part of the fun.

First two tracks available...

2010-04-28T12:28:00.000-07:00

Only a minor post. This is the first pair of Kitty Genovese songs to make it out into the world.

While You Sleep

Noone Knew Kitty Like Me

I'll post more as I go on.

Primary and Secondary

2010-04-20T06:35:00.000-07:00

The First

I have uploaded video of the original version of Flaboo! from 2006. I coded it during a holiday in Cornwall - that being my idea of a nice, relaxing time. I believe it's one of the first of its kind: the endless jumping game. It's odd to know you pioneered a genre long before it became popular.

[Edit: see note from Kalev about 'NS Tower' which was developed in the early '90s!]

Flaboo! often gets compared to 'Doodle Jump'. Those who consider themselves in-the-know wink archly and say, "But Ah! Papi Jump was first..." I'll have to invent some other facial tic to preface my statement: "ACK-tually, Bounce was first. And here's a video of the original code running on a really old mobile."

Link.

I'm sure the scientists among you will state, quite correctly, that this does not constitute a proof. Furthermore, I'm aware that having not publicly 'published' Bounce (only a few friends downloaded it from my site) it is hard to verify.

However, I'm not attempting a scientific proof, nor gathering legal evidence. I know my little Fat Chick was bouncing high into the sky for years before the benozzled quadruped ever left terra-firma, and that's enough for me.

The Second
In other news, I'm facing 'second album blues' trying to decide what to do next. I've now built the animation exporter for Blender, so I can get more complex movement into games. However, with my experiences from Flaboo! it becomes quite hard to decide the best way to move next. I have about 6 game ideas to choose from. Some are ambitious. Some are quite simplistic. Some are very hard-core. Some are casual.

After trawling the feedback from the Free App A Day release back in March, I realised that I wasn't quite sure who I was making games for any more, nor were my personal motivations for making them clear. Here's a selection of the reasons people usually ascribe to their development:

1) To make money
Bwa. And indeed, Hahaha.
The iPhone market is so monumentally flooded with cheap games at the moment that it's hard to make any kind of impact, no matter how good your game might be. Getting your game into the top 25 is much like winning the lottery. I assure you, Flaboo!'s profit is negligible.

This is not the reason. Case 1 fail.

2) To make people happy
I've received quite a few positive comments about Flaboo! via email. When Flaboo! first came out, it averaged as a 5-star game. All seemed well.

However, a curious thing occurred when I made Flaboo! free for a day. My rating went down to 2.5 stars. There really does seem to be an enormous conceptual link between price and perceived value. In addition, I had one chap tell me that if he purchased an app which later went free, he went to all the app stores around the world and spammed them with negative comments to vent his ire. We're talking $0.99, folks. He would have spent at least an hour doing this. That's a lot of rage for such a tiny sum.

From some of the negative feedback and comments I received you'd imagine I'd violated their favourite pet with a novelty toothbrush. For these individuals it seems I actually made the world a worse place than it was before the little Fat Chick came into their lives.

Still others spent so little time even trying to play the game that they didn't realise the game had a) sound or b) tilt controls.

Oddly, and perhaps unscientifically, I find that the energy the world uses to fashion venom and negativity far outweighs the energy used to say something nice. I think YouTube comments illustrate this perfectly.

As a result, I don't feel making small games makes the world a happier, nicer place. Case 2 fail.

3) Just 'cos I have to
If I don't work on games for a week I start to go a bit funny. Ideas start bouncing around my head like ping-pong balls and I start gathering bits of paper together and start scribbling on them like a 3-year old on a tartrazine drip.

My work on Fable 2 largely consisted of director-like duties: ensuring things 'felt' appropriate to Fable, that the story's pace moved appropriately and so on. Despite its resemblance to game creation, it didn't feel like making a game to me, and that dissonance is what started me down the path of being deeply unhappy.

Now all these cares are absent, I'm a little too free. Ideas and justifications for each idea speed through my head and vie for attention, meaning it's difficult to decide... anything. The difficulty with making a game 'just 'cos' is that every damned idea seems like it's the most appropriate - depending on when you ask me, what I'm listening to, and how much coffee I have consumed. As many old club-going friends of mine will tell you, constraint can be a good thing.

Case 3 - a tentative 'yay'. With reservations.

So What Now?
In view of the circumstances, I have decided to take a short break from actively pursuing game-creation. I'm giving myself some time to write a CD based on the events surrounding the death of Kitty Genovese. The first track is here. There's a bit more work to be done, and about six more tracks to write, but I think a break from coding is a good idea. With luck one of the ideas bubbling around inside my head will rise to the top - and stay a while.

The Tortoise and the Hair

2010-03-09T09:07:00.000-08:00

I've given in. I have succumbed. I have turned up my tootsies to the sky and cried 'Uncle!'

(It's always perplexed me that one's indication of submission would be to scream out the title of a family member. Odd. Possibly Freudian?)

I have given up writing the Android version of Flaboo! The reasons? Oh, there are many...

1) Speed.
2) Java constraints.
3) The difficulties of writing native code.
4) The un-enjoyable development environment...

...to name but four off the top of my increasingly shiny head. My remaining hair now has a tuftier appearance than usual due to my grabbing fists-full of it in frustration.

Flutterbyes
When I left Lionhead, I filled my mind with thoughts of skipping through flower-filled fields, care-free, bouncing along greeting the trees and bunnies with a latte in one hand and a tiny, portable dev-machine in the other. In these fantasies I'd sit under a tree while butterflies kindly offered me refills (strong buggers, these particular lepidopterae) and helped me with my typing.

As such, Flaboo! was largely an experiment. It was an experiment in testing out the iPhone development environment. It was an experiment in working entirely by myself. It was an experiment in changing my life.

As such, it was pretty successful. I love Flaboo! I really do. It's one of the purest and best games I've ever written. It might be simple, but it's really, really 'clean' and incredibly addictive.

As such, I thought that branching out and spreading the Flaboo! love to other platforms would be a good thing to do. After all, the game originally started out as 'Hopping Mad Simon', written in Java back in the days of the Siemens MC65. How hard could it be?

Earlier in the year I went to the Google Android developer conference in London, and the folk at Google were kind enough to give me a Nexus One. They also listened to my questions, and have a spiffing support site filled with little gems for the burgeoning android developer community to sink their little milk-teeth into.

How jolly!

Creeping Dread
In horror films (um... take 'The Shining' as an example) numerous small details of 'wrong' slowly congeal into one super-powered 'mighty-wrong'; an axe-wielding Jack Nicholson in the case of 'The Shining', and Wendy Richards in my own personal nightmares.

Look at that face. It's Evil Edna in a wig made from Dougal's carcass. Brrr.

(Youngsters should look up Will-o-the-wisp and Magic Roundabout)

In the case of the Android, the first 'wrong' came when using the device. Its battery has roughly the lifespan of a chain-smoking mayfly who's eaten polonium-sushi for breakfast, followed by a nice long sit on public transport while wearing a bushy beard and a bulky, ticking backpack. Not long at all.

However, in light of the lovely pixel resolution and the early promise of a big friendly API allowing me to do things like play multiple sounds with minimal effort (no openAL! Woohoo!), it seemed like we were going to be bestest friends forever.

Then I started coding for it.

Java
Android uses Java as its primary development language. Java?! It's a language named after coffee! That's awesome! Coffee! Yaaaay!

A warning bell should have gone off when everyone writing Android apps said: "Don't allocate an object. Ever. No, really." At the time I pulled a confused 'Father Dougal' face and moved on. It was a hint of the 'wrong' to come.

Converting projects isn't really a lot of fun as it mostly consists of copying and pasting code over to the new environment, watching a load of red lines appear, and realising that your original code was a bit poo. Slowly, day by day, you watch more and more lines (out of your 300 000 total) turn from red into black.

And then break. You see, Java is a bit 'special'... seemingly just for the sake of it.

For a start there are no unsigned types nor typesafe enums. More little bits of 'wrong'.

(Jack is now sitting at a bar drinking imaginary scotch. It's only a matter of time before the creepy eyebrowless twins make an appearance.)

Also, Java's strings and arrays do not terminate with null characters. That broke a whole bunch of my data-parsing code without me realising it. It wasted about a day; a day where I both gnashed my teeth and smacked my head on the table such that I now have bite-marks in the woodwork. More tiny helpings of 'wrong'.

(Oh no! Jack's typing 'All work and no play...'!)

iPhone Flaboo! uses openGL to maximise performance. I used big interleaved vertex buffers and manipulated them in real-time to get the rotations and scaling you see in the game. Java does things a bit differently (uh oh). You have to use ByteBuffers instead of arrays, and there's no sensible way to cast different portions of them to different types - vital if you're interleaving colours and vertex information. I wouldn't mind if ByteBuffer manipulations were fast, but they really, really aren't. Another 'wrong'.

The Slow Dance
Despite the various hiccups and a nagging feeling that this wasn't as much fun as it should be, I got all my lovely, complex, multi-layered, articulated sprite code working today. I tapped the screen a couple of times causing Fat Chick's cheery little face to appear on the screen.

By the time the game had 20 sprites on-screen it had slowed to a crawl. If you wiggled the roller-ball on the phone it ran at half of even that glacial framerate. In response I looked around once more to see if there was anything I should be doing (or not doing) that would help speed things up a bit.

After a search, the main advice seemed to be to change all my maths into fixed point. Fixed point? I've not used that since 1995! How retro does your hardware have to be to rely on the veritable 'Stonehenge' of game engineering? Big 'wrong'.

(Jack has now seized the axe and is telling all present that 'Johnny' is in the building.)

The other advice was to rewrite a majority of my code in C and compile it, along with all the android OS in a Ubuntu virtual machine or Cygwin. Yuck. As of two days ago there's better support for openGL in the NDK, but still.

Take a look at this. It's the final, capitalised Wrong to end all 'wrong-kind'. Debugging native (i.e. workably fast code) makes Lost's plot look straightforward.

(We've now seen the man in the bear suit, Jack has chased Danny around the maze, Halloran is dead and the titles have begun their roll. Oh, and Wendy screamed and cried a lot, looking much like a novelty bottle-opener with eyes.)

The Final Straw
I started Fluttermind to have fun and experiment with gameplay and graphics, not sit staring at a screen of hex for a day trying to figure out why a @&%£ing cloud isn't rendering properly.

There's no pithy afterward, I'm afraid. Eclipse/Google/Android and I part company today. It's the supermodel that turns out to be a hose-beast. It's the British Mars-probe that crashes due to a measurement error. It's the 'Avatar' that turns out to be 'Dances-with-Smurfs'.

Farewell Android. As I wander off into the distance I have absolutely no fear that you might follow me. Even at my pace you have no hope of catching up.

'Flaboo! Lite' Now Available on the App Store

2010-02-04T15:45:00.000-08:00

By the time you read this, Flaboo! Lite will be available on the App Store.

For those of you with the full version, this will mean naught. You already have the best version. Stop looking for greener grass on my side of the fence. I have a gun, and there's only grass over here. Move along. Wait a moment - actually, Flaboo! Achievements will be available soon, at which point the grass analogy fails more embarrassingly than a british bobsleigher's gusset.

Arse.

Anyway... for those of you reading this who do not already have Flaboo!... um... well... what can I say?

Um...

Hi.

Welcome to Fluttermind.

Nice to meet you.

You must be lost. Are you? Thought so.

Perhaps you were looking for a humorous 'fart' application, or the well-observed simulation of a pint glass, or - if I may be so risque - you sought a full screen depiction of mammary glands? If it is this last, I must say it seems bafflingly redundant considering you're reading this on the internet. The internet = Pornucopia. But I'm not one to judge. Dear me, no.

All I know for certain about you is that you are visiting the little-read blog of a game developer whose work you dont like enough to spend money on. That's fine. It's your right not to buy as part of a civilised free market economy. Without that, where would we be? Eh? Yes, that's right. Norfolk.

No, you go right ahead and read on. Make yourself comfy. Or better still, go and download Flaboo! Lite. It's free. Yes, that's right. 'Free', just like some of the beer, boobies and farts you were looking for. But better.

Go on. Download it. You know you want to! Quick! Before it's too late! Get it before all the 'Free' leaks out!

Flaboo! 1.1.0 now available on the App Store

2010-01-30T06:34:00.000-08:00

Finally...
So it took a little while longer than expected. The Open Feint libraries were rather cryptically and inaccurately documented in places which meant that code which appeared to work did not in fact work at all. Particular mention must go to Matt Jaques who helped me solve that particularly elusive bastardo bug.

Various other fixes are included, including one an annoying sound bug which meant that drinking too much coffee eventually made you go deaf. Perhaps the gods are trying to tell me something. Perhaps I should drown them out with a nice fresh mocha.

Overall, thanks to the patience of both folks at Aurora and my beta test team, all the problems were eventually fixed, so the new Flaboo! is bigger, tougher, more competitive, and better than ever. Long may this trend continue.

Future Plans
I now have 3 big things on my 'to do' list.

1) Investigate Android as a platform
This fills me with some fear, as it's another API to learn, and then - potentially - a whole bunch of hardware specific issues to fix. Re-writing Flaboo! so that it uses 'virtual coordinates' and thus takes account of any screen size is no trivial task. Additionally, I don't know if accelerometer tilt is standardised between hardware types... etc... etc... I hate this stuff.

2) Flaboo! will soon be part of an Open Feint promotion. Woohoo!

3) Flaboo! LITE version will be out at some point in the near future. It'll effectively be Flaboo! with no Open Feint or leaderboards. The people who have bought Flaboo! already have bought free updates for life, so I hope they'll still feel satisfied.

And in Other News
On the non-Flaboo! front, I have two other games on the drawing board at the moment.

The Clockworks is something I've been thinking of for some time. It's kind of paying a debt to all the magical books I read as a child. The pre-pro screens are looking beautiful, and will be using 3D in a really unique way. The aim is to get across the sense of a massive, evocative, magical landscape on a very small screen, and create a gentle, if elegiac experience. That's all I'm saying about it for now.

incoboto is a complete departure from my usual work; a strange crossbreed between an art-house animation and tactile fun. I'm sure a lot of people will immediately say: "WTF? That's a game?" when they first see it. When they realise how relevant it is to them, personally, that'll hopefully change to 'Cool! Let's see where this goes!'

There's a lot of Fable in it, but not in the ways people might expect. It's also a great candidate for a GDC or IGF talk. If you want a hint, I was listening to a lot of 'Mesh' when the idea came to me. Music's a huge part of visualising a game for me - the right song can define a game from the outset, which is really helpful as the months go on.

As ever, it's still just me doing this stuff, so obviously one idea will take precedence, and existing customers of Flaboo! take precedence over everything.

Regardless, I'll post some screenshots when things are a little further along, and see how people react. It should be interesting.

Bayonetta - geddit? Hur hur...

2010-01-12T04:17:00.000-08:00

Thumb Candy
Some years ago, an EA executive horrified me by stating that he considered good gameplay to be 'thumb candy'. His usage of that term was pejorative; the elusive, golden spectre we all chased was demeaned and derided, given no more value than flashy FMV, an eye-catching box, or the prominence of a particular store-shelf on which the box might be perched.

Thumb candy. That's like saying a book's plot and characters are of no more value than the cover.

This sat with me for many years as a psychic rallying-point, something with which I could mentally bash those from publishing and which I could use to distance myself from 'non-creatives'.

Now I'm somewhat at an impasse. I've discovered a game with great gameplay and visuals to match, but with such risible, infantile wrapping that it actively detracts from the experience to such an extent that the experience is ruined.

I am, of course, talking of the introverted teen's wet-dream, Bayonetta.

I first came upon the game at the Igromir game show in Moscow. The show is so retro and booth-babe-fixated in nature that Bayonetta's lurid crotch-thrust poster didn't seem out of place. I assumed the game was some Z-lister's ill-conceived limited release and forgot all about it.

Then the hype began. This was a new breed of action hero, soon to wipe the floor with poor gay-icon Dante. This was an experience with gameplay so sublime that Gods of war, and Ninja's gaiden quailed and quivered in its presence.

This was THE game to be playing, and to be seen to play.

So, out went the £40, in came the game to end all games. I put the disk in and began to play.

Very soon, I found myself doing a couple of odd things. I was wincing. I was rolling my eyes. After a while I realised that I was finding the whole thing incredibly embarrassing.

I'm no prude - I've had a fair few Giger calendars in my time, and can sit through The Crying Game with my parents, pointing at the screen at key moments, with no trace of a blush upon my cheek. But this was something so clumsily adolescent it practically smelled of PanOxyl maximum strength and Bacardi Breezers.

The Good
First of all, I'm genuinely in a quandry. This game's achievements - on paper - look exquisite: more than can be hoped for from a game of this type, and certainly more than is found in 99% of games on the shelves. For example:

It looks great: extremely high resolution textures throughout, loads of particle effects, wonderful-looking terrain and a cohesive art style. Not a common thing.
The framerate is so fast and smooth you have expect to have to pour espresso into the console to keep it going.
The heroine's move-set is large. Really large. Beat-em-up large. And changes with each weapon you pick up.
Enemies are well-designed, very imaginative, and beautifully rendered. The angels are as magnificent as they are gruesome, suffused with a Renaissance filigree that makes them quite identifiable and unique.
The game tries not to bore you at any point, giving you time to practice moves during loads; a fantastic idea.
You can try moves before you buy them. We tried doing this in Fable 1 and 2, and failed to get it into the game due to time constraints. Newsflash: it really does work.
The experience is very varied. Incredibly so. At no point have I ever felt I was grinding my way through any part of the game. I am constantly surprised.
Most importantly, the game feels good, solid and tactile. Years of tropes honed in beat-em-up-style games come out to play, and the use of Witch (bullet) time is well considered and better executed. 5 stars.

The Bad
So, what could the problem possibly be? How can you find one thing to moan about after that, you old misery? How does one look this particular gift-horse in the mouth and comment on its dental history?

Bayonetta herself
Christ in a bucket... where do I start? Many years ago, Freddy Krueger - Wes Craven's nightmare killer - was cool, terrifying and shadowy. Hollywood thought him too iconic, too commercial to remain in the shadows and had him turn into a tap-dancing psychopath with truly awful one-liners.

Bayonetta starts out that way. She is designed to appeal to young men who have never seen women in the real world. Ever. Not even in a supermarket.

She looks like Sarah Palin's porn-star sister, with a wit to match.

She is deeply unlikeable, sharing a vocal style with Batman & Robin's Poison Ivy as played by Uma Thurman. Not a good choice. At no point does she utter anything that isn't a derisive sneer, delivered in a mock-English accent that Dick Van Dyke would be ashamed of.

Most of the time, Bayonetta wears a catsuit with pale gloves. Apart from when her clothes fall off. See, her clothes are made of her hair... sort of... sometimes. This could have been a cool idea, but it soon becomes clear it's only there so they can remove all her clothes when she performs certain moves - usually ones involving her spreading her legs and giving the surrounding baddies a lead shower. Unfortunately, they break this rule of 'big attacks use her hair' all over the place, making it far more blatant an attempt at sexual edginess than it needs to be.

She has guns on her feet. No idea how she fires them. On her feet. Um. It means she can kick really hard... and shoot at the same time. Yes, it's as silly as it sounds. I'm not the sort of guy who questions Elmer Fudd's motivations in Bugs Bunny cartoons; they're predicated on the idea of a talking rabbit, so all bets are off. But so many elements of Bayonetta seem the creative equivalent of Monkey Tennis - invention for the sake of invention or - more commonly - puerile titillation.

The Story
The story of an Umbran witch's attempt to find the gem of whatsit is quite literally... shit. Random, visually led, gold and gem-encrusted shit, maybe, but turdy nonetheless.

Imagine a group of men sitting around a table trying to imagine what a teenage boy would think was cool. Random scene follows random scene feebly pulled along by the quest for... um... see, I've forgotten already. Where was I? Oh, yes. Randomness. Like this:

"Hey - how about she shoots a bullet up the willy of Belgium's famous peeing boy?"

I know it's supposed to be audacious, 'cos, you know, she's a WOMAN and she's shooting a bullet into a COCK! Hee hee. See the imagery? See the metaphor? SEE IT? SEE IT, YOU NEANDERTHAL EUNUCH! SEE IT AND APPRECIATE OUR MUSCULAR, THRUSTING TAKE ON FEMINISM!

Her clothes fall off every 5 seconds, guys. Your 'girl power' schtick is somewhat lost in the cleavage and thrusting pudenda.

Oh, there are some other characters in there, too, but I literally couldn't tell you anything about them. I think they said some random things like: "Holy SHIT!" as something exploded nearby, or "What a day!" as their car was thrown through the wall of a... I dunno... Tesco Metro or something. I'm afraid I was so bored I did what I never ever do ever ever ever. I started skipping cinematics. Yup. Every single one. That bad.

Yeah, I know nobody cares about videogame stories. But... Bayonetta is supposed to be a character rather than a cipher, and thus the story is supposed to be there to make us connect with her. Unfortunately, the story and dialogue are so egregious that they'd come a poor second to an episode of Acorn Antiques re-cut by Tarantino.

The Pacing
I like Norwegian Black Metal. Not all of it. Not all of the time. Nor do I like the bands' politics. However, when I'm in a nihilistic mood 'Thorns' is just great. However, I have no desire for Thorns to be the sole musical form I listen to for the remainder of my life. See the analogy? No? Then I'll rant some more.

Bayonetta's pacing seems based on the single precept that something must explode at all times. If something's not exploding, someone will randomly throw something else into the environment that will explode. Are you standing on a bridge? It's going to explode. A Colosseum? Explodeyness awaits. How about a park? I'm afraid something will throw an oil truck into that park, it'll explode, then something bigger will pick up the entire park and explode it some more. Still sound cool?

The first time this sort of thing happens, you go: "Crikey - that's spectacular!" After the 50th time, you hear yourself mutter: "For heaven's sake. Just stop it."

When you strip back the explosions, you'll find strangely restrictive environments. Invisible walls abound and funnel you toward the next explosion at all times. There is no opportunity to explore, no reason not to run forward, and no sense that there was anything more to a level's creation than the developers' desire to blow something up in your face around the next corner.

It. Becomes. Tiresome.

If Bayonetta Were a...
If it were a film it'd be a porn version of Matrix Reloaded directed by Stephen Sommers*.
If it were music, it would be thrash metal produced by Stock, Aitken and Waterman.
If it were a book... nope... there would never be a book of this. It'd be empty and still somehow confusing. Marvel Comics' worst excesses are works of Shakespearean wit and subtlety next to this confusing mess.

Final Moan
Despite its obvious technical merit and the evident ability of the team who created it, I think the game lacks several things which I increasingly value over and above pure twitch gameplay - as amazed as I am to say it.

Its characters, story, world and tone are gaudy, superficial and cynical. I know that doesn't count for much in a world where few companies can make a game that feels good to play, but the world has moved on. Surely we - as an industry - are capable of so much more than this.

I find myself wistfully looking back at the relative restraint, beauty and atmosphere of the first 'Devil May Cry' game, when Dante was a brooding, near-mute hero and the environments he roamed cohesive, explorable areas filled with a sense of menace. I long for the occasional moments of true tragedy in the first 'God of War' that made you feel that the guy you were steering around the Elysian fields might have depth, and I warmly remember the sense of achievement I felt when maneuvering the great concentric circles of a dungeon on the back of a striding giant into just the right alignment.

Conclusion
While I'd never agree with the guy who said that gameplay was thumb-candy it seems there's more to great games than RSI. There's heart. This game is a cynical, heartless bitch.

If only Bayonetta herself had that much character definition.

*Not even Michel Bay would touch it, and he's a tit.

Happy Holidays!

2009-12-25T02:06:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas / Yule / Hanukkah to one and all!

Thanks for the support over the last year. Your comments and interest keep Fluttermind going more than any amount of sales.

2010 should be interesting. Flaboo! 1.10 and beyond will be available, and perhaps even the Mothwing Empire will see the light of day.

That's it - no more to see here, so go and enjoy the festivities.

Dene

Global leaderboards now in!

2009-12-16T12:39:00.000-08:00

Not much of a blog, but global leaderboards are now in, thanks to Open Feint. It'll need some testing before I'm happy to send it off, but it's in! Woohoo!

That's 1 day turnaround time, folks. That's what I love about the iPhone...

Also, website is updated with video.

Holidaybegone - 1.01 imminent

2009-12-16T01:21:00.000-08:00

So Flaboo is out and responses have been very good so far. For those of you who have bought it I send a huge 'Thankyou'. Please spread the word if you've enjoyed the game. If you're feeling particularly generous write a review or score the game in the App Store. It all helps. Indeed, it's vital for a tiny company such as mine to have good word-of-mouth in order to compete with the larger outfits.

Since the game was launched earlier than I expected I was planning on taking a break until January before doing any further work or PR for Flaboo!. You know, put my feet up and play those games I said I was going to play when I left Lionhead.

Things never work out that way, do they?

Several people have rightly pointed out that my lovely Flaboo! music isn't what they wanted to listen to while playing the game. Apparently some people want to play Norwegian black metal ("Nightspirit, nightspirit, Embrace my soooooooooooul!" intones Ihsahn) while bouncing a fat yellow chick into a bright puffy-cloud-filled sky. Others want to play the spoken works of Sylvia Plath and weigh up the relative merits of various white goods as facilitators of suicide while playing.

As a result, I just uploaded Flaboo! 1.01 to t he App Store. You now have the option to continue playing your lovely iPod music regardless of suitability to the game's mood. The update should be available in the next couple of weeks.

Now to rest... I mean, code the global high scoring. Hopefully I'll be done by Christmas.

Piracy? Already?

2009-12-14T04:55:00.000-08:00

I'm doing very little work, marketing-wise, at the moment. Version 1.1 will be coming out in January with global high scoring. I'm waiting for that to be finished before doing too much PR. As such, I expect little initial interest in Flaboo! Word-of-mouth takes time and nobody knows a game exits until PR happens. Right?

Thus, I am - perhaps naively - stunned to find there are already countless crack sites out there with Flaboo! listed among their downloadable content. That's less than a week.

I have always assumed piracy was linked to price-point and that with Flaboo only being $1 I had little chance of being added to the list of cracked software.

As I say, naive.

If they can't afford a dollar then I can only imagine that the guys pirating it are genuinely needy: you know, destitute, smelly individuals with little chance or hope of a good life living in cardboard boxes while eking out a living selling matchsticks supplemented by their sales of iPhone games from the backs of lorries piled high with louse-infested sacks of games.

Hang-on... these are kids with iPhones.

Hmm.

Second, I'm surprised by the number of random people who now contact me thus:

tw@scumbag.com: Dude - your game looks sweet and I'd love to give it a 5 star review in the app-store. Can you give me a promo code?

These aren't reviewers - who are entirely welcome to a code - but regular kids who just fancy trying their luck. To avoid paying a dollar. One. Dollar.

All I need is a few reviews saying: 'Dis shud be free' and I'll have the set.

The wonderful thing about technology is that it is a social catalyst: society morphs with it, often becoming unrecognisable in a short span of time. Some of that change is bad. The internet's anonymity and cheap data transfer have made piracy more pervasive than ever before.

However, with each negative change that new technology brings there is a corresponding change for good. In this particular case the world's vocabulary has been increased by one wonderful word.

App-holes.

Flaboo released

2009-12-13T08:03:00.001-08:00

Flaboo! is now available here.

Overall, the release process was relatively easy, painless and surprisingly quick. It only took about 12 days in total. That's from 'Agh! I have sent the game off! I hope it works!' through 'What the hell is this form? What do they mean, "Please name the primary beneficiary?"' all the way to, 'Yay! My game is available for people to buy! Wow. Now I have to do the work in supporting it!'

Many thanks to the folks who have bought Flaboo! and also to those who have said kind things about the game. If you're feeling particularly generous, an iTunes rating would help build customer confidence and help the little yellow chick to fly even higher. Although he really should do more exercise, too.

Next: global leaderboards and Facebook integration!

P.S. Forgive the lack of wit or humour in this post. I'm jetlagged from a two-week behemoth theme park holiday in Disney World.

Music and Up, Up and Away!

2009-11-27T01:47:00.000-08:00

I went through three musical revisions on this project. I feel a little like Goldilocks.

First effort (rough and unfinished) was this. Feedback was that it was a little too cold. See - porridge analogy? No? Never mind. Consider this a similie free zone. After spending over a day coming up with various ways of microwa... (no metaphors either) 'humanising' it a bit, I decided to try again with something completely different. Something delicate, moving, and... stringy?

As a result, my second effort was this. I composed the strings on - believe it or not - an alto glockenspiel. I think it's musically successful, but seriously depressing in a 'This Mortal Coil' way.

Also, as I really have no ability whatsoever with drums, I used a Tenori-On to come up with a glitch beat, but the result was... um... variable. No, that's too polite.

Dear God.

The drums.

They sounded great in my little studio/office, but if you play it on anything like an iPhone or iPod speaker...

...they
...drill
...into
...your
...head

...and
...cause
...nosebleeds.

As a result, I decided to go with this piece I composed a while ago. I think it fits and hopefully will neither aggravate nor detract from the playing experience. Mayhap it'll even enhance the mood for people playing on headphones.

To the App Store we go!

As of the 26th of November, 2009, Flaboo was sent off to the Apple App Store approval folks. Hopefully they'll be kind to this fat yellow chick and allow him to be released into the wild where he belongs.

Wish us both luck, and keep a look out for this little icon at an App Store near you.

Flaboo! Off to Apple Next Week!

2009-11-20T09:30:00.000-08:00

I've learned a few things over the last month. They were odd lessons: the sort you pay for without knowing exactly what it was you wanted to learn, and then sit weeks later, honking out scales on an instrument the size of a walrus wondering if the strange, threatening man who claims to know how to play the tuba is actually a music teacher, or a brickie whose house you turned up to one day who thinks it's hilarious you pay him £20 a lesson when he wouldn't know Chopin from Rodan the spikey-nosed monster Godzilla once fought.

Here's a clue:

(The top one is Chopin)

Believe it or not, this wasn't a massive tangent. No, really. Oh, maybe it was. Anyway...

Lesson 1: Names are very important. In my head, 'Bounce' has been 'Bounce' for as long as I've been thinking of it. That's ages (a random value which expands or diminishes an amount corresponding to the distance to the nearest Microsoft employee).

Despite this, apparently, other people in the world have the gall-faced-bear-cheek to think their game is more deserving of the moniker. In fact, I can't help but feel that - in light of the most recent baby boom (yes, of course having more kids than usual during the world's worst recession is the best of all possible plans - no really) there'll be a lot of cheques written to and from Bounce Smith, Bounce Jones, and all the other little Bounces out there once I reach my dotage. Or maybe there won't. Perhaps cheques will be treasured and meted out like golden tickets to a version of Willi Wonka's chocolate factory run by the same people who own Pound Land...

...ahem...

The bottom line is that there's already a 'Bounce'. And a 'Bounce On'. And 'Bounce Up'. And 'Mr Bounce'. And so on.

As a result, it seems that only coining a brand new, ludicrous, non-existent name will stop 2 billion people having got there before you. As a result, Bounce is now 'Flaboo!'

Look left and you will see the title screen in all its majesty. Look right to continue reading.

See. I wasn't joking. 'Flaboo!'

In this year's 'flu season, can I suggest you all start sneezing 'Flaboo!' whenever possible? Please? I can't afford marketing.

In renaming the game, I've embraced the silliness suggested by the title and made various changes.

1) The game now yells 'FLABOO!' at you when you start. Just in case you forgot how silly the name was when you read the icon on the app page.

2) I've given random pieces of sage advice (like 'use an air horn when kids cry in restaurants) that float about in the background. Obey them!

3) Coffee now plays a large part in the game. I know that's not strictly 'Flaboo' related, but I have started calling coffee 'a nice hot steaming cup of Flaboo!' just to get people talking. As I said, marketing is expensive.

Lesson 2: So, music is a funny thing. Not funny 'haha', more funny in an 'oh, why did you have to sit next to me on the tube, you strange, smelly, vaguely threatening man - and didn't you take me for tuba lessons for a year?' kind of way.

For months I've been using Boards of Canada's 'Music is Math' as a stand-in for my own music. I wanted to ensure that the game's mood was all set up before embarking on a musical spree and creating something potentially jarring with the game's rhythm.

My usual musical outings sound like this. It's a little sloooooooowwwwww for a game as bouncy (I mean 'flabooey') as mine. But since the game's finished I now have no excuse for not writing the music and getting it just right.

I wanted Flaboo! (gesundheit) to be 'all of a piece' with no part jarring, or seeming out of place. A one-man-show like mine is probably the easiest way to pursue this... or it would be if I could write happy music with a modicum of sincerity.

I'm not a miserable git, but I don't like my music too saccharine: unless it's so happy it comes around the other side of 'twee' and starts sounding sweeter than unicorn farts. Then I'm up for it. Like múm.

As a result, Flaboo! (Oi? You looking at my pint?) now has music that sounds... um... surreal. Anyone remember Marble Madness's weird FM-synth ambience? Imagine that with a slightly reluctant beat and you're half-way there. The other half is a wide open vista dotted with the carcasses of worn-out gods who have been ignored to death. And twinkly bell-ish bits.

As a result, this game about a little chick who desperately wishes to fly despite his excessive weight now has a very specific, unexpected character. It's already a slightly strange game and it just got a little stranger. Personally, I like it. I hope others will, too.

I'll update this post at some point soon, after I've done the final mix.

Lesson 3: People love repetition. And people hate repetition. As developer, I've now played the game over a thousand times. Personally, I got a little tired of playing the same bits over and over again, even though I loved the simple, rhythmic nature of the game.

In order not to bore myself into an awkward somnolent state, Flaboo! (who?) now randomises every aspect of the game once you get over a certain height. Didn't like that stack of single clouds on your last game? Well, this time you might be plunged into darkness, with only lightbulbs to stave off the shadows. Next time it'll be different.

In addition to the randomisation the game intelligently alters the pacing of the game so there is a constant rhythm of tension and release. Not enough games do this. They are either easy or hard, or random mixes of both. Who hasn't put down a game because of some stupid difficulty spike?

Flaboo! looks at your game-playing session as a waveform and adjusts the difficulty dynamically, flowing neatly from 'challenging' to 'comfortable' and back again as time goes on. As a result, you're never bored and you're never frustrated. I believe this is where the populace usually says: "Result!" I wouldn't know - I don't get to see them much.

Anyhow, once I've remixed the music, this game is going off to Apple for approval.

Please wish both me and the little chick good luck.

Release... pending

2009-10-16T08:40:00.000-07:00

I can't believe it, but I'm almost done.
Bar saving out high scores, options to turn the sound off, pause screens and similar trivia, it's done.

Best of all, the game is really good. I'd buy it (although saying that reminds me of Buffalo Bill preparing for some naked mirror dancing in Silence of the Lambs - but maybe that's just me. Wait... I'm drifting...)

...and I've always thought you can tell how good a game is by how long the testing process takes.

Testing the game takes a long time. This is not because there's so much to debug (it's a modest little title, as it was supposed to be), but because I keep forgetting I'm supposed to be debugging it and find myself - half an hour later - staring at the Game Over screen wondering what it is I was supposed to be doing.

After the enormous massive-team, aeon-long timescale endeavours of the Fable series, this is a small, simple, addictive, fun little game. No feature-bloat. No agonising over key design decisions, story points, or cuts, and now it's pretty much done.

There has been something quite wonderful about the process of making Bounce, and the demands it has placed on me, personally, rather than some other unfortunate. Turnaround speed and feature implementation is frequently measured in minutes.

I make up to eight builds a day. That's not just eight compiles, but eight instances where I feel such a significant amount has changed that I need to individually name and backup the file to avoid significant (and heartbreaking) loss.

Here's an example. Up until yesterday, the beginning of the game was far too abrupt. From the start menu you tapped the screen and you were off! The time limit began ticking down immediately. It was jarring and stressful, nothing like the calm, rhythmic experience that the game was supposed to be.

As such I decided to add a countdown to the beginning, in cute Japanese racing-game fashion. I went downstairs to my sound recording PC, booted up Audacity and counted down into a microphone three times. I layered these over each other, then pitch-shifted the sample up an octave. I then split the file into the individual sounds and plonked them in dropbox, a remarkable little file-sharing and backup utility.

I returned upstairs to the dining table where I code (my wife, Kara, is appalled that our main living space has somehow become my office) and dragged the files from dropbox into the game project. Done.

I could see the outcome and efficacy of my design decision less than half an hour after I made it. I repeated this process about 6 times for the different sounds and found I had finished the entire game's sound effect set before lunch. Yes, alright, I did at one point have a balloon that sounded like a very specific brand of American flushing toilet, but I went back and changed it. In minutes. Not months.

Marvellous.

I must make mention here of the wonderful sfxr, without which the whole sound creation thing would have been much more painful. Anyone who ever worked on the C64 will find themselves crying a small tear of nostalgia.

So now I have a game sitting in front of me. It requires a few cosmetic tweaks, but it's pretty much done...

...or is it? Now I have to make a decision whether to release early and update, or alternatively to keep adding to the feature-set. I mean, I have a great idea for a way to use rare cheeses in the game. And don't get me started on how a hard-hat could really turn the whole bonus experience on its head.

Perhaps things haven't changed quite so much after all.

Back to (Film) School

2009-09-24T03:26:00.000-07:00

I have just completed a condensed film course at the London Film Academy. It was only a week long, but somewhere a time-dilation took place and we managed to squash in about 6 months of material.

As a result of my one-week course, I am now an expert in all aspects of film-making, and may now point at cinema screens and exclaim, "Oh, nicely done, Quentin" or, "What were you thinking, Mr Spielberg?" with a sense of fraternal entitlement.

I wish.

Instead, I now have a new-found respect for all crew and cast on even the tackiest, most inept atrocities committed to celluloid (Mr Boll - call me now so we can share a bottle of wine and weep together over the beauty of your work).

Most surprisingly, knowing what I know (that film-making is impossible) I realise that all films must be imaginary. All of them. Star Wars? I made it up, mate. Never 'appened.

You do not concur? How can I convince you? Ah! Let us examine the plight of the 'focus puller' as an example of film-making's impossibility.

The focus puller is the chap responsible for keeping the camera in focus at all times. As a humbler member of the pseudo-military film-making hierarchy, your average focus puller is not allowed to look into the camera viewfinder. Ever. It's practically a firing offense. He is also not supposed to look at the director's monitor either, as that's not a true representation of what is in focus. Despite this, he is expected to keep the camera in focus at all times, leaving the camera operator to concentrate on framing and keeping the camera-hogging boom-mike out of shot (anyone see the original cut of Arachnophobia? I swear the boom mike should have had top billing).

So what does this poor unfortunate use in order to keep the camera in focus? What sophisticated technologies does he employ to work his craft? Does he staple a bat to the side of the camera and listen to its plaintive cheeps in order to determine the distance to the actor's nearest eye? Perhaps he employs a laser sight with a specific focal range, like a redneck rifleman at an Obama health-care-policy press-conference?

No.

He uses a tape measure.

The poor bugger runs around on the set, placing himself approximately where the actors plan to be, measures how far it is from there to the camera, then uses a pen to mark the position on his white focus wheel. He repeats this for every mark the actor plans to hit.

When the action starts and the (expensive) film stock is being recorded to, he wiggles the wheel around trying to match up to the marks he made previously at the appropriate times, ensuring that the in-between-points are also in focus. If the actors miss their marks by a bit - which they will - he has to... um... guess how far they are from the camera.

Yes, that's right. Guess.

This is only one small part of the insanity that is film-making. I can add others: having to load camera film with your hands thrust through holes in a small black bag (note: if you have a bit of fluff in the bag with you, it's likely to end up on film more than the actors or even the boom-mike).

Fun.

Of course all these screw-ups (focus, fluff and the rest) are only discovered once the film has been developed. This is usually when the actors have gone home, and long after you've lost that 4 hour slot where the local council shut down Oxford Street for your car-chase.

I can now see why David Lynch said he's never using film ever again.

This insanity is not limited to the shooting period. Production is equally demanding. As a producer you need to be able to read a script and spot every single cost involved.

Say one scene in your opus, 'Cockneys Tighten Their Bottom Lips and Point at Each Other a Lot,' features a car chase scene in Oxford Street. The scene also has a live chicken in it. In the scene a car drives up the side of Next and onto the top of a double-decker bus, but note it also has a chicken in it.

As a producer, you need to look at that scene and spot that that you now require an 'animal wrangler'. You then have to find your chicken-specialist-animal-wrangler, ask if he's available, find out his hourly fee, factor that into the cost of the scene and return to the director to tell him he can only have one car in his car chase because the chicken costs too much to shoot. Or that the car will have to bypass next and drive up the side of Primark instead.

So production is also impossible.

While on my course, I was also surprised to learn that a director has relatively little to do with the cameras, instead focusing on the actors' performance. The overall 'look' is very much down to the director of photography's efforts.

I also realised that writers are rarely consulted in the development process after the screenplay is finished, regardless how much the film might be their idea. I think this might be a recurring theme throughout all aspects of the entertainment industry.

So, other than scaring small baby jesuses out of me, what else did I learn?

The course covered writing for cinema, how to direct actors without annoying them, how to ensure your shots are not ambiguous (you might see a piece of paper and know it's a death threat, 'cos you wrote the script, but the audience will just see a piece of paper), lighting, camera operation, editing, sound recording and production.

I'd love to say that all this learning culminated in a day of actual film-making, but that would be a lie. We filmed our scripts after only 3 days of lectures. For the shoot, we needed to have the final draft of the script worked out, discussed and agreed upon in advance, which necessitated home-work.

My group partner, Lucy Wigmore, and I made a short film called 'Sign Language'. It was the touching story of a poor, abused, emotionally fragile female hand, and a boisterous, initially insensitive male hand, and how the two of them close the massive emotional divide between them. It lasts just over 1 minute. I'm quite pleased with the result, but can't share it because there's a chance it could be entered into a festival (and festivals discount anything publicly available including YouTube, or HateTube as it is rapidly becoming).

Overall, this course made me realise how leisurely and stress-free our little corner of the entertainment industry is by comparison.

Just think; in videogames, if you screw up, you might have to stay late one evening to fix the mistake. In film, you have to explain to a producer and an irate director how the entire set has to be re-built from scratch because your hands were a bit fluffy when you loaded the film and Mr Lint now has a starring role.

Finally, I must thank our DoP, Mark Carey, from whom I learned a valuable piece of movie lingo.

Apparently:

'Ow. Ow! OOWWWW!!!'

means:

'Please remove this crocodile clip from my finger. You have just clamped it to the hottest light on set.'

Sorry, Mark.

---

On an unrelated note, this is a lovely example of the sort of thing that got me into coding in the first place.

It's a Wonderful Life

2009-08-12T07:49:00.001-07:00

When I first left Lionhead to start this little venture, many feared for my mental health. They had images of me spending the remainder of my days attired only in a large, saggy pair of y-fronts, my critical and intellectual faculties slowly being eroded by the soothing wash of daytime TV, lamenting past glories like a WWII veteran on remembrance Sunday.

Bar the occasional foray into the world of the 'Dave' TV channel, and the bizarre realisation that I have a strange fondness for - of all things - Top Gear (I loathe cars, hate driving, and have no ambitions ever to own a pair of string-backed gloves) I have largely managed to avoid this fate.

My days are now filled to the brim with sitting in front of XCode, mad dashes around the internet desperately attempting to fill in the large blanks in my game-engineering knowledge that have developed over the last seven or so years of 'being a creative director', musing in coffee shops, and hoping to all that is unholy that nobody 'does my game before I do'.

Far from being bored and be-panted or lamenting the passing of great projects from my life I have instead discovered the incredible motivating forces of naivete and ignorance. There is a colossal universe of things I don't know out there. And it's bloody marvelous.

A couple of weeks back, I was looking at Victorian damask wallpaper patterns (which are - strangely - going to play a large part in my future), old eastern European light bulbs and the soothing aesthetic qualities of dust. This week, I'm renewing my acquaintance with verlet integration, parallax scrolling and alpha channels.

When I started Big Blue Box, one of the things I loved about it was that I had the ability to ensure my working environment was agreeable to me at all times - we all did. Visitors may well remember our rather curiously individual lamps (mine was a chintzy red affair with a tasseled lampshade) and refusal to use anything other than indirect lighting. This control largely passed once our company had gone from 'bizarre cottage industry base' to 'colossal, mature development studio'.

Seeing as I'm now my own boss (I'm thinking of trying to undermine myself in the eyes of me so I can wrangle my way into a more senior position) I'm finding a great, simple pleasure in being able to craft my day's mood as I see fit through lighting, musical ambiance, and even physical location.

I've never worked so hard in all my life. Nor have I ever felt quite so personally rewarded.
Fluttermind's first game's main hero, an overweight yellow chick with a cheery expression, is now alive and sitting on my iPhone blinking cheerfully at me. There's a way to go yet, but it's really coming along.

What will tomorrow bring? No idea, but I really can't wait to find out.

Back to Fever Ray and a glass of red wine, I think.

P.S. Here's a Yann Tiersen track for all of you out there who have ever tried doing anything creative:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xgQ3qPKF58&feature=related

Farewell to Albion

2009-06-01T00:14:00.001-07:00

Leaving
On 22nd May 2009 I left Lionhead and the world of Fable for good.

I started Big Blue Box Studios on the 10th of June 1998 with my brother, Simon, and artist, Ian Lovett. We had no idea what we were getting into, but by God we were going to give it a try. Our original developer diaries are still here, for those interested.

On leaving - having spent 11 years in largely the same company - I found myself thinking about many of the things that seemed important to me at the company's original inception.

Only Nice Folk Need Apply
Let's be honest. Game development is a little wee tiny tad of a bit stressful at the best of times. After 36 hours straight, we developers are inclined to be less fragrant than we'd like, and perhaps driven to the extreme ends of our damaged personalities; psychotic rage, catatonia, repeating meaningless streams of numbers over and over again (12), all sorts.

As such, a sunny, friendly disposition is a godsend. We'd worked with plenty of talented people in the past, but we also appreciated the necessity of working with people both talented and... 'nice', people who'd have your back when the chips were down (and metaphors extended beyond their natural limits).

I think my feelings (6) toward those still at Lionhead is a testament to that policy, and the fact that it's upheld even today.

Never Get Big (you know, 19+ staff)
Anyone who knows me will be aware that I'm not exactly razor-sharp when it comes to the picayune details, so hopefully Ill be forgiven if I report figures less than accurately.

If my memory serves me, at its very largest Fable's team reached the size of approximately... um, 1 billion staff members. Or thereabouts. That does include contractors, of course.

There have been whole forests devoted to the subject of (154) increasing team sizes, and the detrimental effects to communication caused by increasing the workforce by even one small person (and by God, we really tried to make the height restriction policy work).

Despite this wealth of knowledge, somewhere along the line, we failed, and broke our 18-man limit. By over a hundred people.

Wow.

That's a lot of birthday doughnuts. One set every 3.56 days. Fat (19285).

Being Useful
Having gone from 3 (3) guys in a bedroom to our galaxy-sized team, I found that at some point I'd mysteriously stopped actually... making anything.

Sure, there's some of my dialogue in the Fable games, together with naming conventions, concepts, characters, scenes and so on that I guided, suggested, or specced out (the Music Box dream sequence from Fable 2 being the largest and most recent example), but for me that's not quite the same as something created from beginning to end without any other external party.

On reflection, it sounds a little childish, like the toddler who wants to walk up stairs without mummy's help.

But on the other hand, I didn't start BBB to become management. I joined this industry in 1985 with the firm belief that I would always remain a developer.

Sayonara Fable
So, with two Fable games and Albion behind me, it's time to do something new.

Who knows where Fluttermind will go. That's why I chose the butterfly motif (also I'm not enormously directed in my thinking (22)). For now, I'm simply delighted to be able to make something again using my own hands, to have a reason to draw, code and learn new tools.

I know about another billion iPhone developers have gone there before, but I don't care.

This industry is supposed to be about delight. The delight we feel when something appears on screen in a magic of pixels, from nothing. The delight we feel when we explore other people's worlds.

And the cost? All you need is a little time, patience, and motivation.

Let's see where we flutter, shall we?

[www.fluttermind.com is alive]