[Updated August 4, 2020] Right before last Christmas Electronic Arts dropped the price on more than 50 games in the App Store. Instead of $4.99, $5.99 and up, they were all just 99 cents. The idea was to drive the EA apps to the top of the charts just before Apple froze the list for […]
Solar2D Composer Book Online

I’ve decided to put my Composer book online — you can read the whole thing on this site and then put it to use in your own Solar2D games and apps.
How to Become a Part-Time Indie Game Developer

In my case, the answer was to get a job. You see, for the past 12 years I’ve been self-employed, and for the last 6 of those years I was making my living with games (and game development tools and tutorials). Which meant I was a full time indie game dev. Woohoo! But like most […]
gamedev, indie, job, part-timeFiring Up A “Tired” Game Type

The Memory Game Challenge Three Ring Ranch (TRR) is a small game studio in south-central Alaska, about an hour outside Anchorage. Most of our products are game development tutorials and courses, but each of those courses needs a sample project. In some cases we get enthused with one of the sample projects and turn it […]
Birth of a New Game Dev Video Course

[Updated August 19, 2020] Chasy Maze (final name) never did turn into a course, but it was just updated for iOS devices and can be downloaded for free here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chasy-maze/id1139444245 A few weeks ago I started brainstorming ideas for a new game development course and before I can create the video tutorials I have to […]
My Favorite Sites for 2D Art

As an artist, I’m a really good programmer. So I buy my artwork off the shelf. Good news is that it’s fairly cheap — bad news is it means your game (probably) doesn’t have a distinctive look. But until I clone myself and learn to draw I’m stuck with buying artwork.
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GameObject artistJay = Instantiate(artistPrefab, transform.position, Quaternian.identity) as GameObject; |
Here are some […]
Unity 2D Game Tutorial for Beginners

Many of you know I’m now a full-time student and that has me cutting back on creating tutorials. Not enough time. So how is it that I have a new tutorial for Unity 2D game development? Because my CS109 class is using Unity and since I have game dev experience I’m a “peer mentor” for […]
Swift, Corona SDK, Game Dev, and Me

On the first day of WWDC 2014 Apple surprised everyone with the introduction of “Objective-C without the C” — a new programming language called Swift. It’s a language that leans more toward typical “scripting” languages than compiler-based languages (although it’s still compiled and apparently is very fast). I’m one of those folks who gave up […]
The Coming Apocalypse

When you’re watching a movie and the music starts getting scary sounding, and building and building… …you know something bad is coming right around the corner. In the game dev world I hear the music building right now, and while the script is still being written, I’m going to guess what’s coming. But first, a […]