For some time now I have been watching the community at Garage Games slowly get bled back behind the pages of what seems to be a lot of commercial back scratching. I am constantly reading articles about raising the prices and fan hype cheering them on saying indies can afford it. This immediately says to me that existing users feel threatened by the competition. Just look at the casual games market, it is overpopulated and finding a good title now takes quite a bit of digging.

Now a bit more of my history, interests and lessons learned. I have always hailed the era of DOS-Win9x and SNES as the greatest era in gaming history. That era on those platforms rendered more games that stole away many worthwhile hours of my life. Now the handheld platforms are picking up where they left off and once again I playing games that I feel are worth my time. I had originally pictured Aeges Road a DS game until I priced it. While the graphics aren’t’ by todays standards great, I still find them appealing and acceptable, some times even better than some of today’s graphics. IGN my think Chrono Trigger for the DS should have been 3D, but I beg to differ that point. When I started my project I was of the mind that 800×600 would be just fine for an indie, but after reading some reviews for Eschalon Book I, my confidence faded quickly as I realized I was going to have trouble getting the right details in a 128×128 animated sprite.

Then came along the iPhone. At first I never payed it any attention due to its NDA knowing full well tutorials and instruction were going to be expensive to get to. But low and behold they dropped the NDA as well as the up front charge and simply charge 30% on every sale, very cool! At that point I knew the iPhone needed to be my target platform as I was still struggling with the graphics after nearly two years of working on them. Unfortunately, the development tools I use decided to tag on an expensive up front cost to dive into iPhone development. For about a month now I have been trying to justify paying the price for iPhone development, but the bottom line is, the cash isn’t there and this indie can’t afford it.

I really became discontent and this post at Rampant Games didn’t exactly help me find complacency.So I spent a while looking into alternatives. I am at the end of my Unity demo, and was able to do some cool stuff just playing with it, but Unity is too expensive to get to the iPhone as well. It wasn’t until last Thursday that I began reading forum posts at iDevGames looking for a good way to start from scratch when I stumbled upon this post. There are currently three open source iPhone engine projects, two of which I am looking to use.

SIO2 is a very cool 3D engine for the iPhone that uses blender for level editing! I already know blender, and C is not a far cry from C++, in fact, it is sometimes easier to figure out what is going on quickly when it is C rather than C++. I have been frustrated with isometric tools and have been debating going 3D with The Soldred Kingdom back when it was still Aeges Road. I have always had a vision in my mind of how I wanted it, and even had a jogl prototype and java3d level editor partially working at one point. With blender being the level editor, I can see this being fairly easy to implement.

Cocos2D is just neat, and it gave me an excuse to do something I have wanted to do since I bought a mac, learn Objective-C. I bought the Aaron Hillegass book as suggested on iDev and I love it. I will go as far as to say I think I like Objective-C better than I like Java, and I really like programming in Java. Once I get done with the book I think I am going to update my Guru account and put this as an available skill, sadly I turned a Cocoa contract down last year due to inexperience. But back to Cocos2D. Cocos2D was and is still a python game engine, thus making it cross platform compatible which would gain for me Linux, a target quickly lost with my old tools. Cocos2D was ported to Objective-C for the purpose of iPhone development. Most of the tools associated with Cocos2D, including the level editor, are in python. I played with it a bit, and I was impressed with how small everything is.

Both projects have a lot of tools built in including physics(!!), and they are open source to boot. The iPhone has a smaller resolution making graphics much easier for me to work with, and oddly enough comforming to many of my original visions for the games. After I get all of my tools and SDK’s downloaded (which will take a while) I will be starting with Cosos2D to get my smaller project (which will be shown off soon hopefully) off the ground. I was able to make it functional with 2 fully playable levels in TGB in 12 hours, so I am shooting for 36 hours given my unfamiliarity with the tools, engine and language (granted I had never used more than basic physics in TGB before either). Finally, what is really cool is that I can show all the code on my blog I want as I hope to design some stuff that the two communities might find useful.