Archive for January, 2010

Indie Culture: Stuff That Sticks

Saturday, January 16th, 2010

In 2008, both the launch of the iPhone SDK and the rise of Twitter seemed to birth something special – a community of indie developers, particularly amongst the game developers. I’m not sure where it came from, but it’s an ever expanding group of people, many of whom have never met or only meet at conferences; yet they interact, help each other out, even share about their lives with each other. There are no cliques in this culture – anyone is welcome, even if you don’t yet have a published app like me. I love being a part of this truly global group of people – they’re always encouraging, always helpful, and always friendly.

I remember one incident that will always stick out for me. Before I’d left my job, and before I’d even graduated from uni I was working on my dissertation project, and I was seriously stuck. In my last ditch attempt to try and conquer this hideous bug, I tweeted it. And to my surprise I got a reply – Jason Citron, founder of OpenFeint replied giving me his IM details, then looked through some APIs, made some suggestions and together we fixed it. I really believe this could have easily made the difference in my final Uni grade – in the end I scraped a First! But what really amazes me was that, even though Jason is a busy guy, even though it was 3am where he was, and even though we’ve never met, he still wasn’t too busy to help.

So what’s my point? That we should all use OpenFeint? Well, not exactly (although I don’t see why you wouldn’t!). I just wanted to inspire a story that prompted more of the same. The culture you find amongst the indie developers is already brilliant, but why not make it even better? Lets be people who look for opportunities to help each other out, who are prepared to say, “I’m not busy – what do you need?”.

Progress Report: Game progress for me this week has been largely overshadowed by a freelance iPhone app project that I’m working on. I’m looking forward to having something live on the App Store soon, even if it’s not mine. Hopefully they’ll be more to report next week!

Posted in Business, Casual Games, Culture | 1 Comment »

You’ve got to know when to quit

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

The last thing I posted was announcing Rizer Messenger – an iPhone to iPhone instant messenger to enable people with iPhones to communicate for free. But just before Christmas, I decided that this was not the way I should be going, so took the tough decision to stop active development on it. Here’s why:

I started making my messenger client (let’s face it, I needed to come up with a better name!) when there was just one competitor. I knew I needed to be quick, but I didn’t quite realise how quick I needed to be developing this. Now I’ve lost count as to how many direct competitors there are, most of which have more features than I would have launched with and many of which are free – just not a viable option for me. I felt like I couldn’t keep up with the rapid development that these people who had a good head start on me where making. So I quit.

“Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.” – Seth Godin, The Dip

Quitting so often is looked upon as something to be ashamed of, but sometimes it just makes sense! There are times where the best thing you can possibly do to succeed is to give up. Change your plan. Go down another route. I guess it’s a shame in some ways the the messenger app didn’t work out, but actually I’m really glad I didn’t keep going. I learnt a heck of a lot, and I’m now working on a whole new app. This time it’s a game, which is what I really wanted to be doing from the outset. I’ve really thrown myself into this new project this week, and it’s already pretty much playable in it’s most basic form. I’m reenergised to do something awesome, and I’ve let my creativity fly.

The new game is going to be a simple, casual mathematical challenge game, building off the popularity of things like SuDoku and Brain Training. And because I’m having fun with this, I’ve been working on the characters, back story and game design! I’ll be posting more details and development ‘snapshots’ every week up to release. Cannot wait for release day!

Posted in Casual Games | 4 Comments »