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

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.

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

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

From CommonCraft comes a great video explaining how you can use social bookmarking sites (in this case, del.icio.us) to get more value out of the web as well as contribute value back into the web socially.

Update: Jeff Hoard has more details. Netscape has a discussion about this under way.