Be Excellent To Each Other

Just got a staff member to:
Program 807
Scenario 786
Graphics 488
Sound 418

Salary $44,157.6k

The lovely Francoise Bloom, I assume? She's acebest.

Though I have a soft spot for Grizzly Bearington.

Holy fuck. My guy I upgraded seven times to make him a hardware engineer was on over 3 million by the end of it. He was 3/4 of my salary bill on his own.

Yes. I've taken her up to level 5 in every career. She just did +15/+7/0/+88 on a music compose task for me. Crikey.

My programmers are on 49k and I can't get them to split a thread between them

That's a hell of a lot of grinding for only one real benefit (GOTY) over the experience most people get from a 20 year play through though. Thats why I'll probably not be playing again.

That, and having other things to do for a 6 hour period.

I'm still in my first 20 year play through. Edit -- and I got my GOTY ages ago, when Bloom's stats were 200-300 across the board.

Program 42
Scenario 37
Graphics 85
Sound 2
Bananas 784

Do you know Apple themselves have an iPhone game out?

For whatever reason it's a Texas Hold 'Em game, and being rather partial to this particular card game, and also being sick to fucking death of the notifications (yes, I know I can turn them off) and the overall presentation of World Series Of Poker, I decided to give it a go. I mean, a game by the actual platform developer has got to be good, right?

Hmmm... it's a decent enough poker game I guess, but what's this? Ah right, that'll be no retina display support, no Game Centre support, no multitasking support and it doesn't respect the mute switch.

Excellent work, Apple! Leading by example, I see?

Just got my second 'Game of the Year' award, for "Whore Craft 2", after 14 years.

Might not finish the 20 years this time around, though I have recently developed a Motion Mini-skirt game (WTF is a mini-skirt game?) called "Booty Shake", which amused me enough to make another game or two in odd genres.

I got 10, 9, 10, 9 for PooKeeper4 last night

Oh ok, just had another run through.

Year 1. Reduce staff level to one. Do a quick contract
Year 2. Develop mining simulation game
Year 3. Take over world.

My Zookrapper and your Pookeeper will be a battle for the ages!

Can we split this game dev stuff into its own topic please?

Yep, my post about data charges on O2 changing from Monday got lost under it all. I thought it was interesting anyway, but nobody mentioned it.

Especially as I'm after a way to get more than 500MB of data on my plan for as cheap as possible.

I may just have to resort to turning data off overnight or something. I have to say, that since running out of my allowance and doing just that (turning off data), I only have to charge the battery once every 5 or 6 days.

Trainyard is fun, and only 59p at the moment.

It's essentially a puzzle game centring on guiding trains to their respective stations by drawing track for them with your finger, but not in real time.

It starts off insulting easy, guiding red, yellow and blue trains each to a station with simple tracks. But it quickly starts introducing the concept of junctions (which switch direction every time a train passes over them); stations that only accept one train, sparking the need for you to merge trains together so they can all hit the station at the same time; stations that only accept secondary colours, again sparking the need to merge trains but having to pay particular attention to get the right colour mix.



Well worth the money so far. Bloody good fun, and a decent challenge.

Edit: oh, and it seems to be made entirely by one guy in his spare time, so I'm more than happy to send him some money for this great effort.

I love Trainyard. It's good. I'm frightened by the sheer number of levels it has, though.

Guy at work showed me Trainyatd, it scares me.

ATC is good, it's a Flight Control clone with more realistic graphics, time of day effects and more to do.

Can you push a fat man onto the tracks though?

In case any of the iPhone faithful are interested, ChuChu Rocket is now available in the App Store.

Buy, download, and go "Oh, so that's where Zio got his avatar from!". I DARE YOU.

No online multiplayer though, which is a bit shit considering the Dreamcast could do it with a 33.6k dial-up modem.

Cut the Rope is brilliant.

Indeed it is. Indeed it is.

3 star'd all but one level, which is very unlike me, and something I could never be bothered to do with Random Birds (TM).

I was playing Cut The Rope with Mrs Bulge the other night in a very "Nintendo DS advert" way. Once we realised how much sickly, suitable-for-all-ages fun we were having we stopped. Then I shat on her chest. Or something.

Of course I was street fighting hobos throughout my play time of Cut the Rope.

Darn tootin'!

Just finished my second (and final) playthrough of GDS.

Highest selling game was Shit Orc 7 with 65.5 million units sold.
Won GotY 7 times... all for the Shite Orc or Whorecraft series. They seem to like giving the award to Fantasy games.

Best coder by the end was Cokie Bottleson:
Program - 682
Scenario - 704
Graphics - 637
Sound - 500

Also good were Chimpan Z-Force, Kairobot and Francoise Bloom.

Rather enjoying The Creeps. It's a tower defense thing and quite likeable. Any other TD recommendations out there?

The GeoDefense series is very good, but bastard hard.

I found GD:swarm really tough.

TapDefense was an ok game, around 2 years ago. I think it was free, but I imagine there is a lot better around now.

Pshaw! GD: Swarm was easier than the original! In that I at least managed to finish it.

iPhone: it's like the future. A future that still can't do Daylight Saving Time properly.

Mine switched over alright yesterday. I didn't think it would but it did as I woke up at some silly o'clock (like 5:30am) and my phone had corrected itself.

Phone switches, alarms don't.

One off alarms work, recurring alarms don't. I imagine it's tied into the core alarm framework, which has to be timezone aware, of course.

It caused some confusion this morning. But anyway:

<makes more notes in book>

I see I'm not the only person here affected by my iPhone's alarm hijinks. Thank fuck my boss is on holiday - I'd have loved explaining to him that I was a bit late and deshevelled due to my mobile phone not waking me up at the right time this morning.

Brilliant, so it's not just me, then. That's a really, really stupid thing to let happen.

It's mentioned on the Register this morning too.

I'm sure that mine worked ok, I am not sporting the lates OS though if this has anything to do with it?

@theegg- it's an iOS4 only problem, so if you're still on v3 you won't have seen it.

I wish I knew about the bug last night...

... I would have come in an hour later today and blamed it on my iPhone

Cheers, chaps.

Tried the free version of GD and it was insanely hard in that I couldn't get past the first level. I must be missing something. I notice when you drag from a tower it draws a line, is this just for aiming or is it something that'll stop me getting completely destroyed?

Tap Defense seemed okay but the difficulty curve goes a bit awry after a while. Still, pretty likeable.

Creeps is the best one I've played so far on here.

Complete and utter recommendation for iTrials.

cons:
individual levels are too long.
Controls take some getting used too.

Pros:
It's trials HD for the iPhone.
The controls become lovely and responsive after a short while
Really imaginative and fun levels. A talented game designer is at work and not just some hack that the lazy idea theft suggests.
It's 59p!

stunning good value, most fun I've had since cut the rope. My main problem with the game is that I think the rev would have loved it :(

Goodness.
That's... A really strange thing to happen.

From the Apple forum:

Bought on the strength of your post. It is indeed excellent, a shame there's no one unifying leaderboard provider for these games!

Fucking tell me about it. Apple doesn't grok gaming at all. OpenFeint is pretty good but suffers for not being OS wide.

Is the alarm problem fixed if you delete the recurring alarms and recreate them?

No, apparently not.

It's apparently fixed if you turn off 'Set automatically' in your time/DST settings, then delete and recreate the recurring alarms. I'm yet to actually test it, though. (and I'm syncing my phone now, so can't test yet)