Category: Director

My first real iPhone/iPod touch game — Bedeviled: The Most Diabolical Sliding Puzzle Game Ever — went live with both a US$0.99 full version and a free, limited version in the iTunes App Store on Friday, 3 July. It’s a combination of a sliding tile puzzle game and ball-in-a-tilting-box labyrinth, derived from a Flash game concept I did more than eight years ago.

Bedeviled was executed in Unity, a 3D game development system which which has a tie to my days as a Macromedia Director programmer, in the person of Unity Product Evangelist Tom Higgins, who was the Director Product Manager back before Macromedia’s sale to Adobe. I wouldn’t say that there’s a lot of similarity between Unity and Director — which was a more general multimedia development tool — but if you did much work in Director’s latter-day subset of Shockwave 3D, there’s definitely some knowledge you have that’s useful. That said, I had a pretty frustrating path to getting my toes wet enough with iPhone development to get Bedeviled from my original concept to where it is now, i.e. selling somewhat less than a copy a day over the past several weeks.

I’d toyed with the idea of programming for the Mac more generally for a long, long time. Long enough to have taken stabs at Metrowerks’ CodeWarrior and earlier versions of Objective-C development environments. But it never really jelled for me. For me, Director was always the crack cocaine of programming — I suppose that would make Flash the methamphetamine — and trying to get things done in C++ and Obj-C just seemed like trying to swim in molasses. Late last October, though, in an attempt to broaden my skillset beyond the two environments I’d been working in for the past fifteen years (one of which nobody seemed to have much interest in any more), I bought a new laptop and an iPod touch. My trusty desktop computer doesn’t have an Intel chip, so it can’t run the version of Apple’s Xcode IDE needed for iPhone development, and neither would the Toshiba Windows laptop whose dead pixel columns were itching for replacement. I also bought a couple of books on iPhone programming: Erica Sadun’s The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook and Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche’s Beginning iPhone Development, which were about the only iPhone-specific titles available at the time.

I spent several weeks working through tutorials in both books, reading blogs, and generally learning my way around Xcode. Got myself signed up with the Apple iPhone Developer program right away. Had a minor hitch getting my business license information synced up with Apple so that I could be ready for the checks to come rolling in, but managed to work that out with a very nice woman from their business unit. But I’m not ashamed to say the size of the programming portion of the task was rather daunting. There’s was so much in even the iPhone-specific Objective-C libraries that it was difficult to know which way to turn to accomplish a particular task, not to mention learning the idiosyncrasies of Obj-C formatting.

Then, in early December I heard about Unity’s recently-released iPhone publishing system. Tom hooked me up with a demo copy and I started working with it a week or so before Christmas, but a family emergency combined with the most snow Portland had seen in fifty years diverted time and energy for a couple of weeks. I was trying to find as much common ground as I could with my Shockwave 3D knowledge, in an effort to put together a working model of the game’s basic mechanism (something I could do in less than a day in SW3D), but was running into some problems. From an email exchange with Tom, it didn’t sound like what I wanted to do was possible (or at least not recommended) in Unity, and by the time my trial expired I had a paying Flash project that required attention for several weeks.

Of course, by the time I got back to Xcode, I’d forgotten more than I remembered, and I had to refresh myself a bit to get up to the point where I’d left off. I got an idea for a quick, free, gag application that the App Store promptly rejected. It almost took me longer to prep the distribution files and fill out the forms for submission than it did to write the application (and it took me a day to write the app). But, they didn’t reject it because I’d done anything wrong, they just thought that it didn’t have as much user value* as, say, iFart.

So after re-learning some stuff in March, I started work on Bedeviled in earnest, learning my way around UIViews and UIImageViews, and figuring out how to cut up UIImages. And once I’d managed to do all that, I uploaded a development build to my iPod and it ran like a complete dog. Which was, of course, why I’d tested it, but it wasn’t the result I’d been hoping for.

Up to that point, I hadn’t touched OpenGL ES except for some very simple tutorials. I knew that the iPhone had the capability to do what I wanted to do with Bedeviled — after all, there are a number of actual 3D games on the iPhone and what I needed was much simpler, in processing terms — but I was becoming aware that something that implemented OpenGL was going to be necessary.

And so, in mid-April, I was back knocking on Unity’s door and got a second trial of the iPhone publishing tool. This time, nothing intervened, and — after getting past some technical issues — I figured out how to do what I needed. Best of all, when it ran on the iPhone as a build through Xcode, the performance was great. I spent about six weeks (not full-time) working on the game, submitted it to the App Store on 20 June, and Apple approved it yesterday.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to promote a game that came out the first day of a holiday weekend!

Anyone who is reading this blog for its now non-existent Director content already knows about Integration New Media (INM). I can’t even remember the first time I learned of their existence, it was such a long time ago, and they’ve been such a vital part of the Director community, with some of the first entries in database and PDF control Xtras.

So even though I haven’t really done anything with Director other than open up a couple of old projects (and, admittedly, do a 1-day Shockwave3D prototype of the iPhone game I’m working on) for a couple of years, I’m more than happy to spread the word about INM’s 20th anniversary. The various folks from INM with whom I met (they threw some nice get-togethers at conferences), talked to, and corresponded over the years were always great to deal with, and I’ve long hoped I’d have a reason to get to Montreal to visit in person.

That’s me and INM president and co-founder Vahe Kassardjian up top, at the 2003 MAX in Salt Lake City. Happy 20th, Vahe and INM!

The music that’s been the background for my best programming runs has always been surf guitar, the type of surf music that came out of the early ’60s and was exemplified by people like Dick Dale and The Ventures, the latter of which lost a member Sunday with the death of guitarist Bob Bogle, who lived just across the river in Vancouver.

The Ventures — who only made it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year — can be reasonably credited with kicking off the surf music genre with the success of their instrumental “Walk, Don’t Run.” In the last gasp of the instrumental pop hit, they had several, including covers of “Telstar” and the theme song of “Hawaii Five-O.”

Now, I don’t swim all that well, and the closest I lived to the beach growing up was about sixty miles (and that was in an era when surfing on the Oregon coast was pretty much unheard of) but given that The Ventures were formed in Tacoma, actual surfing experience seems to be a prerequisite for neither playing ort appreciating surf music.

I remember liking the songs I heard on the radio as a kid, but my real immersion into surf began in a dark period of the early ’80s in Eugene, when a long-term relationship (for that age, at least) had just broken up and I was starting to find my feet again after having been out of work for most of two years in what was then the most brutal recession this country had seen in some time.

A woman I met through my volunteer disk jockey stint at a radio station invited me to meet up with a friend of hers who (like her) was a musician. The three of us got pretty drunk on cheap wine in the Pioneer Cemetary across the street from MacArthur Court. He was the bassist for a band that played surf music, both covers and originals, and when I saw them at the next opportunity, they were incredibly good. And The Surf Trio got me started on a path that — once I got back into programming in the early ’90s — proved fruitful for some time.

The best of instrumental surf guitar surpasses silence, for me, as ideal programming music. Intricate rhythms, no lyrics to distract me, it’s like spackle filling in the cracks in my concentration and smoothing out my attention, making it easier to work for hours on end without distraction (the cats are another question). For years I was able to crank out material under the influence of surf music, but sometimes I forget the lesson and try to make do with the standard contents of my music library or radio news or podcasts, and everything just falls apart.

So I’m sorry to see Bob Bogle go. He was one of the pioneers of a form I truly appreciate. He’s left a legacy of great material. Hang ten, Bob.

In addition to anniversaries of the science-fiction convention I put together and the time I watched a building in Portland blow up (well, down, at least), this May is the anniversary of the end of the last job I held, at a company called Reality Engineering.

Back in October 2005 I got hired for what I called The Last Director Job In Portland, just before heading off to that year’s MAX conference in Anaheim.

I’d started looking for a steady gig because even that far back work at the bottom of the multimedia tank had started to get pretty spotty, for whatever reasons, and the year-and-a-half of steady employment I received from Reality helped get us back on our feet after effects of the dot.com implosion combined with my little brush with death.

But it’s been two years since that ended. Incoming projects (Director, Flash, or whatever) have been even less frequent than they were four years ago. Resumes and project inquiries have gone out steadily since I was laid off with nary an answer. A couple of the projects that came to me from previous contacts fell through, and one client still owes me thousands of dollars for work I did more than a year ago.

I had a conversation a couple of weeks back with a graphic designer I know whose been in worse straits for longer. He’s lost his house and is subsisting on the kindness of some friends along with a very small income from a part-time front desk job. It’s not just the lack of income that’s a problem, but every month our portfolios get dustier and more out-of-date. Not that anyone’s looking at them, but even if they were, when you’ve been scrabbling to find small jobs to fill in the cracks and the last major project you worked on was literally years ago, what kind of impression does that leave on a potential client? Where have you been since 2005? In prison?

Like a lot of other desperate or semi-desperate people, I’ve got some hope and money riding on the iPhone gold rush right now. Like a real gold rush, the people selling mining supplies and leading people across the passes are the ones who are going to come out of it well; a lot of the rest will end up worse off than they were before they made the trip.

Crossing my fingers and hoping that I’m among the lucky ones this time. I’ll let you know how it ends up when I’ve released my app (whether you care or not).

Shockwave made a brief appearance (along with Flash) as the spark of the independent gaming market on WNYC’s “On the Media” last week. Hats off to writer Clive Thompson for the props as he brought it up in the beginning of this interview with host Brooke Gladstone:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The innovative spirit that marked the early days of video game development was crushed under the weight of the high-stakes, multi-million-dollar businesses built on the appeal of consoles like Microsoft’s Xbox, Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo’s Wii.

Now independent game production is again on the rise because the geeks want it, the gamers want it, and more recently, as you’ll hear, even giant producers like Microsoft want it.

Clive Thompson, who writes for Wired and The New York Times Magazine, says that innovation started to creep back into game design, after more than a decade in hiding, about seven years ago.

CLIVE THOMPSON: What happened was that it became possible to do your own game because Flash and Shockwave came along, which are like these little languages for programming something inside a browser. You know, you had tens of millions of people that could potentially play your game, and you could put it online and get it out there for free.

So lot of the young talent started going, well, I’ll have my job where I’m the assistant animator for Scooby Doo Number Four-

[BROOKE LAUGHS]

– you know, something completely horrible – boring to play, boring to make – and in their spare time they started saying, I’m going to try and design a little game on my own that is going to be played in Shockwave or Flash on a browser. And this was the real first boom, the first flowering in indie video games.

Good, although I’m fairly sure that not even a majority of Shockwave game developers were young or working as assistant animators. But it’s nice to know not everyone’s forgotten Shockwave.

Today is the first anniversary of a business transaction that’s likely to haunt me for a while, as well as a milepost on an economic road that seems to have a lot of potholes.

In the middle of last winter, I got a call from a local multimedia company with which I was well-acquainted. In fact, it was the first place I’d applied for a job in the multimedia business back when I first got involved with Director, although they didn’t hire me. But I got to know some of the principles back in the pre-Internet era, when I worked on the newsletter for the Oregon chapter of the International Interactive Communication Society (long defunct) and one of the company’s co-owners was the president of the chapter (later, things got so bad that I was the president of the chapter, but that’s another story).

In following years, I did a couple of subcontracting projects with them, most notably a series of Shockwave3D articles for Intel’s Game Developer site. Never a problem working with them, never a problem getting paid.

So it was without any trepidation that I agreed to do some Flash work for them last February when one of their developers left, signed the contract, worked in their office, etc. As called for in the contract, I invoiced at the end of the month, which meant a smallish invoice for February, then a good deal larger for March (which was dated 1 April 2008). Payment was 30 days from invoice, so even though I hadn’t gotten a check for my 1 March invoice by the time I wrote out the 1 April invoice, I wasn’t concerned; I had six weeks of solid work under my belt with a company I’d done plenty of business with in the past. And even after another week had gone by, when I was asked to make a few minor changes just after getting back from a trip to Phladelphia and getting the smart car, I didn’t have any compunctions about it. That is, until the company principles pulled me aside after I’d made the changes and said that they couldn’t pay my invoices.

And that’s where the saga gets unpleasant. It’s not as if I’ve been swimming in work for the past couple of years, so there’s no guarantee that if I hadn’t taken the project at Planet Productions that I would have been earning any money during that period, but it’s possible. What really torques me off about it though is that there’s no way they didn’t know weeks before that they weren’t even going to be able to pay my invoice from work for February, which was less than a third the amount of the invoice for March’s work.

The first payment I got covered my 1 March invoice. I got it in October. A month later I got about a third of the amount on my 1 April invoice. It’s been nearly five months since I saw anything. So far, about 47% of the total amount I invoiced has been paid. Today’s the anniversary of the largest of the three invoices.

April Fool.

One of the last articles I was ever asked to write — and definitely the last I wrote for a print publication or on Director — was for the MX Developers Journal. The incomparable James Newton was working as an “unofficial/unpaid editor” on Director-related material approached me about writing something for them, and I just happened to have finished a fairly simple kiosk — but one with live video feeds — for the Oregon Zoo that I thought was a project that could be digested in a few thousand words.

By the summer of 2004, the days of getting paid to write material on Director were already long ago and gone, despite the MX Developers Journal‘s glossy paper and four-color printing, so apart from the few copies of the magazine that I received (only after whining to the in-house editorial contact at Sys-Con the publisher, which in itself completed a circle with my first experience in magazine publishing, 30 years ago next month). I never expected any payment for the article.

Then again, I never expected anything like this, either. WHile MXDJ died long ago, Sys-Con has continued publishing online journals and sponsoring seminars. Apparently, the company launched a site called Ulitzer.com a couple of years ago, and some of the authors like Aral Balkan — a London Flash developer of some note — are just hearing about it for the first time

Apparently, some 6,000 authors who have written content for Sys-Con publications in the past are now having their work reprinted (unpaid) at Ulitzer, at subdomains personalized with their names. Moreover, no attempt appears to have been made to contact the authors to notify them that this was going to happen. Balkan was told — when he questioned being identified as a “Ulitzer author” that he could modify his biography and even apply for Google AdSense dollars generated by his pages on the site to be sent to him, but unless an author had been notified that the site existed and that this was a possibility, then presumably Sys-Con would have gone on collecting all monies from SAP, Microsoft, Symantec, and the other companies that placed ads on the site.

After complaining about Sys-Con’s practices (and getting his articles and name pulled from the Ulitzer site, for which he gave them credit, Balkan then found that Sys-Con had written calling him a homosexual and comparing him to the attempted assassin of Pope John Paul. It’s truly an incredible story that’s nowhere near over yet I feel, but Sys-Con’s actions reminded me an awful lot of someone I’d encountered before.

And just look at my personalized site on Ulitzer! Apparently I’m such an insignificant cog in their rip-off machine that they can’t be bothered to spell my last name right (see the subdomain name under the Ulitzer logo).

You have been removed from the DIRECT-L list.

Oliver Breidenback at O’Reilly’s “Inside iPhone” blog notes the release of Seadragon from Microsoft, a new iPhone app:

Seadragon is a viewer for ultra-high-res images. Imagine a contact sheet with all your 15,992 iPhoto library pictures filling the iPhone screen. You start to zoom in, zoom in, zoom in until a single photo fits the screen. Then you zoom in more and another bit until one pixel fills the screen. Quite impressive

Maybe I’m just jaded, but then I’m a guy with I don’t know how many copies of old xRres disks from my old Director bundles and a long memory:

Shockwave for xRes

Objective

Shockwave for xRes enables users to view, pan, and zoom large image files on the web quickly, based on xRes technology. Shockwave for xRes is basically a CGI script for Windows NT and Unix web servers that is available free for downloading in the Macromedia Developers Center. The Mac plug-in and Afterburner are available for end users; however, Mac web servers are not supported yet. The CGI scripts for Macintosh web servers and Windows 95 web servers are still under development. Microsoft Internet Explorer is currently not supported. Considering the fact that this is a beta plugin, there is no direct support from Macromedia Technical Support, and the user must rely on the information available on the web.

…

Copyright 1996 Macromedia Inc.

Last updated: September 26, 1997

Created: Before June 25, 1997

As if anyone needed the dates to know that was from a while back when the page has words like xRes, Afterburner, and Windows 95 on it.

What I should be doing with my time instead of reading my email and blogging (assuming I had any real talent):

Sep 19, 2008, 01:34 AM

Trism developer Steve Demeter revealed at a conference that he had generated $250,000 in income from his popular iPhone game since its launch on July 11th.