Thursday 23 December 2010

You wait for ages then 3 come along at once

So, quite recently it seems I was ranting about not having any income after Game Room came to an end. Well since then I've been offered 3! I'm starting on a 2 months contract with the possibility of more work to follow in early January. A friend of mine arranged the work and for that I am extremely thankful. Several other friends also spread the word and I had several other inquiries come my way, one of which was an actual offer of work. I sadly had to turn it down. The third offer was a converson of a flash game to iOS. I get these a lot and usually ignore them. Mostly they are games that wouldn't work well on iPhone, games that wouldn't sell on iPhone and always with no actual payment for my services, only royalties. And since I have personal experience of how little an iOS game can sell I usually turn them down. This game was different. It's a unique "sound toy" as I've heard it described. I think it really does have a chance if selling. Plus the developer is happy to pay upfront which not only means I'm not working for nothing but it means he is invested too. It's easy to say "I'd like to see my game on iPhone" but not as easy to say "I'm willing to pay to see my game on iPhone".

The game is IsleOfTune.com and it's generating a lot of interest. I'm working full time on it until early January and then I'll be shunning friends and family and working on it evenings and weekends only. It really does help that I really like the game and I'm very enthusiastic about the whole thing. I'm ploughing through the code and I'm hoping that a good deal of it will be done over the Christmas period. I really want this to be successful to restore my faith again in the iOS market. So, head on over and have a play.

This of course has given me and excuse to buy an iPad. I've been laying off getting one as I don't really have a use. I have an iPhone which is essentially the same but smaller. However now I have one I think I may surgically attach it to my arm. Just the increased screen size makes all the difference. Things that used to be excruciating on iPhone are now simple on iPad. I'm typing this right now on iPad and I'm maintaining a decent typing speed. So, that means in the house we now have 3 iPhones, an iPod touch, an iPad, a MacPc and a MacLaptop. I am becoming the most despised of all things, an Apple fan boy. How did that happen!

Anyway, I suspect I am rambling due to the late hour.

Merry Christmas y'all!

Monday 13 December 2010

Merry F*$%ing Christmas

http://www.1up.com/news/rumor-krome-studios-shutting-down

The wonderful, challenging and above all steadily paid project I've been on most of the year has come to an end. According to reports Krome (who were writing "Microsoft Game Room") hit financial trouble and let all but a handful of it's staff go. I was one of the lucky ones who continued to work with them on Game Room. Sadly it has now come to an end and I'm out of a job. The Krome guys were fantastic. They were hard working and diligent yet managed to be laid back at all times. We did some brilliantly technical and wonderfully challenging work on the project and everyone involved was very sad to see it come to an end.

The work itself was very diverse and interesting. I was tasked with decoding the custom hardware on the arcade boards and writing emulators for them. My time was split between analysing the hardware (photo), analysing the original arcade code and writing the emulation for the decoded components. It was at times extremely difficult and challenging but we knew it wasn't imposible. Mainly because several freeware emulators had done it all before. For obvious reasons we could not, under any circumstances, look at any other emulator. This effectively meant we were starting from scratch. We did however have one big advantage. We were legal! We had the approval and permission of the relevant arcade manufacturers. I and several other coders on the team had actually written emulators before. Personally I'd written a ZX Spectrum, Game Gear, Master System and Game Boy emulator some years back so I was aware of how this sort of system worked. I'm also an accomplished hardware designer and had previously reverse engineered several of the 8 bit consoles back in the day. But that's another story.

Anyway, back to the theme. It's Christmas and I'm out of work again. Ok, technically I'm not out of work as I work for myself but I don't have an income into my company at the moment which is the same thing. Let's hope that some of the feelers I've sent out recently come back with offers of work.

Merry Christmas everyone,