I am thrilled to announce that after a few short months, the company I co-founded, Get Set Games, released its first game for the iPhone last week.

Addicus is a number-based puzzle game. The premise is simple to grasp but you’ll find it’s difficult to stop playing once you’ve started. You are presented with a screen [...]]]>

I am thrilled to announce that after a few short months, the company I co-founded, Get Set Games, released its first game for the iPhone last week.

Addicus is a number-based puzzle game. The premise is simple to grasp but you’ll find it’s difficult to stop playing once you’ve started. You are presented with a screen full of cute, jiggly mushrooms. Each is coloured either red, yellow or blue and numbered. A goal number appears on screen. It’s your job to tap the mushrooms that add up to the goal number before the timer runs out. If a red goal number pops up, then you can only use red mushrooms. If you go over the goal number or pick a wrong colour, then you’re toast.

The reaction we’ve seen so far has been wonderful. Hundreds of people have already downloaded it and it keeps getting 4 and 5 star reviews on the App Store. Players are climbing over each other to reach the top of the online leaderboards.

I had a blast working on this game with our team. We spent many nights and weekends holed up in one of our apartments, coding and art-ing away. We have a team that is made up of people that are individually very good at what they do, but when you put us together it’s like lightning in a bottle.

The initial ramp-up for iPhone development was not as bad as people make it sound. The first few days are admittedly rough, mostly because of the unfamiliarity with objective-c. But very shortly after that, something clicked and objective-c just made sense.

Other things helped along the way. We used the cocos2d for iPhone framework. It saved us a ton of time that we would have had to spend working with OpenGL. There is no end to the nice things I have to say about cocos2d. From the API to the community, it’s just top notch. Not to mention OpenFeint, which made integrating social features into the game super hella easy.

Please do check out Addicus and let us know what you think. You can get it here: http://addic.us

I’m happy and excited to announce that along with 4 friends, I have started a game development company called Get Set Games. We are going to be focusing on the iPhone platform to begin with, which I have been dying to develop for since I first laid eyes on it.

The 5 of us have worked [...]]]>

I’m happy and excited to announce that along with 4 friends, I have started a game development company called Get Set Games. We are going to be focusing on the iPhone platform to begin with, which I have been dying to develop for since I first laid eyes on it.

The 5 of us have worked together for years in various ways and participated in every TOJam event as well as this year’s record-setting Global Game Jam. You may remember us as Team Awesomo. It is the spirit of game jams that we intend to focus into iPhone game development. “If we can do Flock U in little more than 30 hours, imagine what we could do with with 60.”

We are already well under way on our first project, seen above. Stay tuned to the Get Set Games site for the latest developments on our developments.

So handy is Google Reader’s “Popout” link [...]]]> If you’re like me, your monitor real estate is in high demand. One small corner of one of my displays is dedicated to video viewing. It is usually occupied by a video that I have popped out of Google Reader using the “Popout” links Google applies to embedded videos.

So handy is Google Reader’s “Popout” link that it inspired me to create a bookmarklet that does the same thing when you are on any site that hosts a flash video.

If you come across a flash video you would like to watch but would rather not keep the page it belongs to loaded, you can use this bookmarklet to pop it out into its own little window. It supports just about any page that contains flash video.

To use it, just save or drag the following link to your bookmarks toolbar:

… and then try it out on this video:

If you would like to contribute to the Universal Video Popout Bookmarklet, join the Google Code project.

I spent the weekend with Team Awesomo making a game at the Global Game Jam. Our result is a game called Love and Hate.

Love and Hate is a game of domination, alliances and betrayal. Up to 4 people play as little monsters in a world filled with enemies big and small. Each player can eat [...]]]>

I spent the weekend with Team Awesomo making a game at the Global Game Jam. Our result is a game called Love and Hate.

Love and Hate is a game of domination, alliances and betrayal. Up to 4 people play as little monsters in a world filled with enemies big and small. Each player can eat enemies that are smaller than they are, while avoiding enemies that are bigger than they are. As you eat smaller enemies, you grow big enough to eat bigger enemies. Predator becomes prey. Get hit by a bigger enemy and you are reduced in size. The player who is the largest after 90 seconds is the winner. As an added twist, players can team up and combine their size to establish further dominance.

We developed it using XNA. This was my first time using XNA extensively and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get something up and running quickly. This will definitely not be the last time I take advantage of XNA.

More screenshots below.

After reading about FriendFeed’s proposed Simple Update Protocol (SUP) earlier today, the idea of all of the WordPress blogs around the world publishing near-instantaneous updates to FriendFeed grew too delicious to pass up. So I have [...]]]> Wouldn’t it be nice if you published a post to your blog and within seconds it showed up on FriendFeed?

After reading about FriendFeed’s proposed Simple Update Protocol (SUP) earlier today, the idea of all of the WordPress blogs around the world publishing near-instantaneous updates to FriendFeed grew too delicious to pass up. So I have created a plugin for WordPress that will assist with that.

WP SUP is a plugin that adds the SUP-ID HTTP header to your blog’s feeds and pings FriendFeed’s public SUP feed when you publish a post.

During testing posts were showing up on FriendFeed within about 10 seconds of being published.

This is my first WordPress plugin, so brutally honest feedback is definitely appreciated.

Download it here: (zip)

Installation instructions and other info are here.

The 3rd annual Toronto Game Jam has just been announced for May 9 – 11, 2008. If you’re not familiar with TOJam, it’s a weekend-long event where game developers and artists gather to tackle the challenge of creating a complete game in just 3 days. It’s a friendly, collaborative environment where burgeoning game creators can [...]]]>

The 3rd annual Toronto Game Jam has just been announced for May 9 – 11, 2008. If you’re not familiar with TOJam, it’s a weekend-long event where game developers and artists gather to tackle the challenge of creating a complete game in just 3 days. It’s a friendly, collaborative environment where burgeoning game creators can exchange ideas and get some recognition. You can participate as a single, in a team or as a floater, helping others out. The end result is always a slew of games that shows off Toronto’s wealth of untapped game development talent.

Things I would love to work on and/or see at the jam this year:

• non-musical re-interpretation of guitar hero/rock band controllers
• iPhone games using the new SDK (might be hard with few iPhones in Canada)
• games driven by web content sources (think Wikipedia: The FPS)
• alternate reality games

Using the Python client library to work with the Facebook API made it easy to [...]]]> We just launched a new version of Touchpoint Gallery with a very important new Picture Source built in: Facebook. Now you can tap into the billions of photos on Facebook and use them as your screen saver and as your wallpaper.

Using the Python client library to work with the Facebook API made it easy to offer a slew of different options in this Picture Source. It’s our most robust Picture Source yet. With it, you can retrieve any of the following types of pictures from Facebook for use in Touchpoint Gallery:

• all of the pictures that you have been tagged in
• one of your albums
• all of your pictures
• all of one of your friends’ pictures
• one of your friends’ albums
• all pictures that one of your friends is tagged in
• all of your friends’ pictures

Lots more new Templates and Picture Sources coming soon!

Norm blogged about how Touchpoint Gallery is like having infinite refrigerator space for your kids’ artwork.