I’m just testing the new theme, please move on.

I keep collecting resources on two key themes: indie games and iPhone development. These themes intersect quite often, and I have collected 100+ articles with tutorials, game reviews, analysis, post mortems, dev commentary, objective-c resources, iPhone specific videos, dev tools, etc, etc,  and I just can’t seem to read it all. It’s just so much stuff.

It’s all very inspiring, but at the same time incredibly frustrating that I can’t find the time to process all this information, and give each piece the time it deserves. And so collecting all this becomes part of the problem. I now spend more time gathering info than actually digesting it, because the gathering part is easy and can be done quickly.

Juggling this passion with a master’s course, a part-time job and (of course) private life can be difficult.

Just to show you that this isn’t just fun and games, here’s a photo of one of our working places:

Maybe a game is coming soon, who knows?

It all started with this joke cover, defacing The Maltese Falcon. Then came some screen mockups. And then I was knee-deep in dry humour and mistery scents. And PALib for the DS. We had begun Pocket Bogart, our homebrew adventure game for the DS, that is now in the “lost bin”, waiting to be revived.

We were two guys, me and the writer. It was tough to give up the writing position to get down to coding, but I’ll be humble and recognize that his writing is better than mine. Still, I did manage to impress him with a chat between our main character, the titular Rick Bogart and the Dame, the Lady in the Distress, the Femme Fatale.

I managed to get a decent interface working, even had a couple of revisions concerning design. What I’m most proud of is the dialogue system, we even have a tool to treat dialogue and compile it into .h files for the game to read.

I’m ashamed that we didn’t finish it. We have a pretty cool demo that I’d love to show off, some day. As always, the lack of a deadline and the lack of ARTISTS caused some stumbles.

There’s a great film noir tale to be told yet.

After much deliberation, sweaty tears and hard work by our very own Final Fantasy VIII character, we make the first real post in our website/blog/portfolio.

In the future I’d like to discuss some of our previous ideas / demos, like the Pocket Bogart adventure and The Mechanist Multiplayer RPG.

Part of our team recently completed/achieved alpha status on another project, however pending further inquiry we will determine when/if/how to make it known.