What are you working on?
OK so this is a direct response to another thread, where one poster was asking how to improve the local game industry community. And I'm left wondering, if we're a game development chapter...where are all the games? Gotta have something for everyone to get mutually interested about. So, what games are you working on, professionally or in your free time? Let's hear it!
(Yes, I know I'm out of the loop, and I'm sure that everyone else is already vaguely familiar with everyone else's work. But humor me please because I am genuinely interested)
*Oh and please try not to breach your NDA's!!! I'd hate to hear of pinoy game developers getting kicked out of their studios because of a little online show and tell.
Hey Snowfly -- Great stuff! Seems like you're free to tell those things without breaching NDA's -- lucky you.
As for me. Well, It's almost been year since I've done some programming personally. What I've been trying to "debug" at the moment are issues with my personal life hehe. But, I recently got an Xbox 360 and I'm excited to try out XNA and putting out a community game. Been reading stuff on how to do so. Sadly, I have no game idea yet in mind and the usual problem I get into is art. I can't do the art myself. Anyway there are other things that can be done as for the moment.
As for work, actually there's not a single project assigned to me. Though my lucky fellows have projects now. So things are getting boring.
You should try agile to get those issues sorted out. I'm serious 
As long as you have a clear idea of the end goal, it's all about baby steps.
Too bad about not having anything assigned to you, it does make the job hard to look forward to in the morning. On the bright side...at least you have a job! You should ask your manager to put you on R&D time for XNA. You're at Kuju, right?
Keep us updated on that personal project! And put up the prototypes here when you can.
-oh and I've only linked to news about the projects I've worked on that's already in the wild, so I hope no NDA's were broken. Here's the post on Tad Williams's blog where I grabbed those pictures, and an article on Slashdot
Hi Andrei, I think you can mention some things about what you're doing, as long as it's ridiculously vague. For example, "we're working on a great mini-game collection for the Wii" probably won't get you into too much hot water.
In any case these issues need to be threshed out with the GDAP core members in the near future. We can't be a community of developers if we can't share anything right?
In my case I have a bit more leeway since I'm a straight up freelancer.
I recently finished work on a casual 2D shooter called Rick Rocket:
http://www.mygamecompany.com/Products/RickRocket/main.htm
People have been giving some good feedback so far, and it has in it's first day outsold all of My Game Company's previous first day sales, which is a bit of an achievement. It's also opened my eyes to the viability of indie gaming that isn't casual or even picked up by the press. There are quite a few companies that manage to make a decent living making games for specific niches (in this case kid-friendly games).
I'm also working with another indie developer on a 2D racing game:
http://www.newstarsoccer.com/
And lastly, I'm working with a startup Ukrainian team on a small iPhone "mind" game. It's hard to explain what it is, but it's quite an interesting project.
There are also a few projects up in the air, but there's no point talking about them until they become more solid.
Hi everybody! I don't recognize the new faces here - then again, I'm an old face :P Hahaha! I was with IGDA Manila back in... 2004? 2005?
The company I'm working for (Boomzap) just released Orchard, a casual farming sim, on Big Fish Games.
Currently, I'm working on a few demos which I'm not allowed to discuss, but they're all cute and fun.
Previously, I worked on Anito: Defend a Land Enraged and other games under Anino.
Originally posted by RyanSumo
In any case these issues need to be threshed out with the GDAP core members in the near future. We can't be a community of developers if we can't share anything right?
In my case I have a bit more leeway since I'm a straight up freelancer.
You know most people would want to share but there are things that should be kept secret. Or else, they'd have to kill you. :-p
I think the way things are with regards to NDA is ok. I don't see any problem at all. As long as we keep things professional here, it's ok. GDAP won't have control on what can be said or not, because normally it's an agreement with the publishers or their clients. We must respect that even we are a community of professionals. I think we can share is our non-proprietary techniques. Or, information that is derivative from what can be gathered from the general public.
Originally posted by RyanSumo
I recently finished work on a casual 2D shooter called Rick Rocket:
http://www.mygamecompany.com/Products/RickRocket/main.htm
People have been giving some good feedback so far, and it has in it's first day outsold all of My Game Company's previous first day sales, which is a bit of an achievement. It's also opened my eyes to the viability of indie gaming that isn't casual or even picked up by the press. There are quite a few companies that manage to make a decent living making games for specific niches (in this case kid-friendly games).
I'm also working with another indie developer on a 2D racing game:
http://www.newstarsoccer.com/
[/B]
Indeed that is an achievement! Congratulations!
Thanks!
About NDAs, in the end it will be up to the individual's prerogative whether or not he should share things, and you should definitely go over these things with your superiors as to what's fair game and what's not. 
Usually it is very clear within a company as to what you can and can't share about yoru project outside the company, whether it's IGDA or press or your friends.
If it's not clear, you should go and have a sit down with your boss right now
I'm sure we all know what we're allowed to say. Cheers!
For people who work with ery sensitive NDAs, maybe you could talk about what you were working on last. Stuff that's already out in the wild.
Originally posted by purploony
Usually it is very clear within a company as to what you can and can't share about yoru project outside the company, whether it's IGDA or press or your friends.
If it's not clear, you should go and have a sit down with your boss right now
I'm sure we all know what we're allowed to say. Cheers!
Unfortunately, your boss is a cheena beng bastard, and doesn't want you to share anything. Secrecy is the only protection!
er.. what am I saying... Feel free to chat about anything not currently under publisher embargo for all I care.
Orchard was released by Majesco Entertainment, btw; BFG and the rest are just doing online distribution.
Allan
Originally posted by Odin
Unfortunately, your boss is a cheena beng bastard, and doesn't want you to share anything. Secrecy is the only protection!
er.. what am I saying... Feel free to chat about anything not currently under publisher embargo for all I care.
Orchard was released by Majesco Entertainment, btw; BFG and the rest are just doing online distribution.
Allan
Ah Majesco, the forward-thinking publisher that brought us such great hits as cooking mama.
What's that, Mama? My dumplings aren't good enough? I'm so sorry 
I'll do it again, just to see your eyes light up!
I need to play that game again.
Congrats Luna and crew on launching Orchard! I'll have to play the demo one of these days now.
Here's a game Ryan and I worked on ages ago (building on some excellent work by Pol Gadi and Aldrin Menardo)
Pipe dreams of getting Wisedog into a fighting game! Last I saw, the installer files were making the rounds on some Vietnamese GSM forum.
Hmmm, NDA's... maybe we could do charades or something.
Commercial stuff that's released and in the wild, the old Terrawars: NY Invasion, and a version of CandyGram.
Commercial stuff that's about to be released and in the works: *various hand waving gestures and lots of hopping up and down*
Uh I think I get what Ryan is trying to say... well the title is "What are you working on?" which I took literally meaning its the present tense.
Anyway, last October Kuju Manila Inc. released it's first Filipino-made game and first Filipino-made game on the Wii, Circus Games, an action-packed collection of 20 mini-games target at the very young market (and moms I guess). It's published by Ubisoft.
A selected few in Kuju Manila are now working on well-known AAA titles I would never had imagined possible to set foot here in the Philippines. Our only hope now is that it would not get cancelled and deliver expectations.
Originally posted by AndreiVictor
Uh I think I get what Ryan is trying to say... well the title is "What are you working on?" which I took literally meaning its the present tense.
Anyway, last October Kuju Manila Inc. released it's first Filipino-made game and first Filipino-made game on the Wii, Circus Games, an action-packed collection of 20 mini-games target at the very young market (and moms I guess). It's published by Ubisoft.
A selected few in Kuju Manila are now working on well-known AAA titles I would never had imagined possible to set foot here in the Philippines. Our only hope now is that it would not get cancelled and deliver expectations.
Now you're talking! Yeah, Kuju's behind stuff like Geometry Wars (not exactly triple A but ridiculously popular) so I'm sure you guys are working on something juicy!
Nice! The game industry back home's a lot different than it was when I left, glad to hear studios like Kuju are starting to give us opportunities like this.
Here's the Circus Games review on IGN:
http://wii.ign.com/articles/938/938187p1.html
wow we have wii game developer/studio pala heheh. nice.
as for me, what i'm currently working on (and stuffs i've worked on the last few years) aren't related to game development hehehe. hay...
Hi nomad, one of the functions I'd like IGDA to have in the future is the ability to match programmers with artists so you can make your dream projects. Think of it as "business matching" like in the large conferences but limited to individuals or groups of developers. That's why we need your help to build the developer base, so that we can have more people to work with!
Originally posted by Odin
Unfortunately, your boss is a cheena beng bastard, and doesn't want you to share anything. Secrecy is the only protection!
Everyone, meet my boss :P Wahahaha
I'm working on an iPhone game - a mastermind clone! though with a twist.
We're going to make the player feel that they are hacking through a very futuristic and advance system. Their job is to break the code every level.
Oh well, my partner was convinced that creating games for the iPhone might get us rich - due to the recent trends.
Who knows, as for me, I curse Mac and Xcode and their SDK and objective c altogether for every single line of iPhone code i write!
I'm quoting someone's blog post on the net which is basically very true. This is about concatenating 2 strings together compared with other programming languages.
NSString *string1 = @"string1Text";
NSString *string2 = @"string2Text";
NSString *newString;
newString = [string1 stringByAppendingString:string2];
I’m not counting ease by lines of code — they’re obviously all pretty much the same. But the fact that I have to know a method called stringByAppendingString: method is just stupid. Not to mention if I wanted to append a integer to string1, what happens then? More than likely I’d have to cast my integer to a string in an inline method call and then call the unnecessarily verbose stringByAppendingString: method.
Here's the whole blog post:
http://riactant.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/
And just look at that horrible function call. Yes string1 is the class instance and stringByAppendingString is the "selector" which is basically a member method.
Oh and did I mention there's no garbage collection? The nearest you can get is through their smart pointers.
Perhaps I'm being noob since I haven't been programming for the iPhone for more than a week, but as far as I'm going, I'm having teething problem every time I program for the iPhone.
Maybe i should take a stab on objective c++!
Originally posted by mickeydy
I'm working on an iPhone game - a mastermind clone! though with a twist.
We're going to make the player feel that they are hacking through a very futuristic and advance system. Their job is to break the code every level.
Oh well, my partner was convinced that creating games for the iPhone might get us rich - due to the recent trends.
Who knows, as for me, I curse Mac and Xcode and their SDK and objective c altogether for every single line of iPhone code i write!
I'm quoting someone's blog post on the net which is basically very true. This is about concatenating 2 strings together compared with other programming languages.
Here's the whole blog post:
http://riactant.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/
And just look at that horrible function call. Yes string1 is the class instance and stringByAppendingString is the "selector" which is basically a member method.
Oh and did I mention there's no garbage collection? The nearest you can get is through their smart pointers.
Perhaps I'm being noob since I haven't been programming for the iPhone for more than a week, but as far as I'm going, I'm having teething problem every time I program for the iPhone.
Maybe i should take a stab on objective c++!
hehe, you could write your back-end logic/utility codes in C/C++, it'll still work when you use it with objective-C (though your code will look dirty na I guess).
Originally posted by mickeydy
I'm working on an iPhone game - a mastermind clone! though with a twist.
We're going to make the player feel that they are hacking through a very futuristic and advance system. Their job is to break the code every level.
Oh well, my partner was convinced that creating games for the iPhone might get us rich - due to the recent trends.
The iPhone game market is saturated so it'll be a lot harder to make big bucks that way. A lot of it has to do with marketing, which has been made easier since you can do a lot of viral marketing on the internet, and people who play games on an iPhone or ipod touch are usually internet savvy consumers.
Developers are also getting more recognition because when they have a few games under their belt or really popular game (aka Rolando), they can link back to their suite of games and encourage players to purchase games from them.
Do a bit of research on ngcomo and copmanies like PixelJunk, which while not making games for the iPhone, market themselves in a similar manner.
Haha not the first time I've heard a programmer slog their way through learning Xcode for the money carrot. Is your partner picking up iphone development too? He/she should really share the pain for bringing it up in the first place
Mastermind clone sounds like a nice quick first project to wrap your head around the basics. In the future, would you consider using Unity to get most of the groundwork done for you? I hope you do, I plan on picking up a license soon, in the hopes that it'll make it easier for a non-technical person like me to collaborate on an iphone project.
Shameless plug- NFS World website is up!
http://www.nfswo.com.tw/
Hi Guys
The number of applications out there at the apple store definitely scares me - a whopping 20,000 apps in just 7 months since the apple store went online. That's a crazy number.
My partner actually wanted us to go adware - like we post small in game banners and that's how we would earn our riches. I was reluctant at this and wanted to go with the normal retailing way, but he insisted on earning through advertisement so I guess after reading your post I think this is the way to go right now. Or we might probably end up with 2 versions of the game - one that is lite mode which has in game advertisement and another full version for $2.99 which does not have any advertisement.
Hi Snowfly
Yes, we're definitely going for some commercial game engine like Unity 3D or Torque when we decided to create more sophisticated games.
My partner takes care of all the game art, design and writings (his day job involves creating game reviews for a Turkish magazine, yep his Turkish met him over at the XNA forums), so his completely not technical so I don't bother him with any technical details and all I do is put his stuff and designs into the game.
But yeah definitely I'm so not passionate with developing in a Mac environment. I guess like any kind of jobs out there you do need to sacrifice sometimes
Iphone market is already saturated due to the news that a number of people get rich with it. Now, everybody's after the same thing.
But yeah, it's something not to be ignored. You do what you can and must do at the moment.
Originally posted by mickeydy
Hi Guys
The number of applications out there at the apple store definitely scares me - a whopping 20,000 apps in just 7 months since the apple store went online. That's a crazy number.
My partner actually wanted us to go adware - like we post small in game banners and that's how we would earn our riches. I was reluctant at this and wanted to go with the normal retailing way, but he insisted on earning through advertisement so I guess after reading your post I think this is the way to go right now. Or we might probably end up with 2 versions of the game - one that is lite mode which has in game advertisement and another full version for $2.99 which does not have any advertisement.
Hi mickeydy, having those two version s would be a great idea, if only for research. At least you'll be able to compre which "SKU" did better, and how much you earned from ech. Statistics and data like that can help you decide which path to take in the future.
Don't lose hope if this first iPhone game doesn't make it big though. Think of it as a stepping stone for future games. good luck!
Alright, thanks guys. Ill share with you guys how it goes once it goes commercial.
Feeling a bit bipolar, working on these two guys back to back...
Mockup screens for the iPhone game I'm currently working on with two Ukrainian developers. Feedback on their forum makes me feel like it might actually make some money, so I'm kicking myself in the behind for not asking for rev share. :P
Ryan - that looks pretty nifty i love how the screens say everything you need to know about the gameplay and controls on the first glace, and the art's pretty nice too.
how do you feel about a lot of design these days looking like glass?
more work on this guy:
OK I guess someone should start eh?
I'm making UI for the recently announced Need For Speed World Online (or NFSW if you like). Personally I prefer the localized title for our launch territory better, "Terminal Velocity, Pleasant Sensations".
Outside of work, I try to work on small game projects once in a while (not necessarily videogame); right now I'm collaborating with a presenter at this year's GDC who'll be demoing his research on emotional respone through AI. Obviously he'll be handling all the real work; I'm building the character model that will be displayed on the big screen, and helping set up a system so it all hooks up nicely with his demo engine.
Oh since this thread is also unofficially titled What -was- I working on, up to a few months ago I was doing concept art for an Otherland MMO, which is still in the works, and built on Unreal Engine 3.
Here are a couple of marketing shots the studio released with characters I designed:
Blue girl (model by Philip Herman)
Lizard man guard (model by Marc Tan)
*passes the potato*
Zee game of love is never called on account of darkness.