One of my biggest pet peeves with wargames is when they treat units as nothing more than cardboard counters on a map. This is an easy trap to fall into, probably because the units are, in reality, nothing more than cardboard counters on a map, but that’s not the point. It’s called conflict simulation for a reason, sports fans, and conflicts aren’t fought between bits of printed paper and resolved on neat little tables. They’re fought between armies made up of men (or people, if you’re gaming the last few decades), who have very human weaknesses. Their primary one, from a strictly military standpoint, being an overwhelming and not unreasonable desire to survive the war, go home, and have 2.3 kids with Peggy Sue/Lili Marlene. They’re trained, disciplined soldiers (unless this is 1941 Eastern Front, when all bets are off), …

It’s great to be part of Shenandoah Studio and working on games for my day job again!

One of the first tasks is to decide on what technology we’ll be using. We’re making board games, so we don’t absolutely need a game engine that squeezes every pixel of performance out of the GPU. On the other hand, we want to make games that sparkle in both look and feel. And we have an ambitious lineup of titles, so we want to be able to bring them to iPad efficiently.

There are three broad options:

Use UIKit (the native iOS SDK). This worked fine for my game King of Dragon Pass, and it’s probably the best way to keep up to date with any changes Apple may make in the next iOS version.

Use a sprite-based engine like Cocos2D or one of its derivatives (such …

Nothing like a change in spec to mess with my day. iPad the Next Generation is coming out and in typical “Q” fashion, a snap of the fingers has our interface in two split realities. For those not keeping up, iPad:TNG has 2048—1536 pixels while the previous iterations are 1024×768. 4X pixels in the same surface area is great for super crisp graphics, but what happens to apps using pixel resolution to drive touch interactions like pinch, slide, and swipe?

In general, touch location is returned as a pixel location.  As the touch location moves, comparing the previous touch location to the new touch location to determines the delta (change). On iPad2, if a touch moves 1 inch horizontally in portrait mode, the delta is ~105 pixels, on the new iPad it’s ~210 pixels. If an image was set to rotate fully …

Today wraps up my first week with the talented folk here at Shenandoah. There’s so much to do, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. My first priority is setting up a development environment that everyone is comfortable with. Before a single line of code is written I want time spent learning the rest of the team’s approach to problems.

No designer wants to scroll through memory management code

In getting to know Pat (Art Director) this week, I found he’s incredibly mindful of how his art is used and presented. This is a great quality because if I can provide a way to quickly view/tweak assets, he can keep his focus on a stellar presentation, instead of waiting for the latest build.

Jeff (Game Designer) has been tweaking and building some cool systems that make Bulge a blast to play …