Months passed with new features and constant improvement. At the end of this week, I want to submit a first version to the public. I proposed this to Friday, but do not know, how much time the review-process of the App-Store will take into account. The feature set is basic, but with the “Send .png per e-mail”-function, it is possible to integrate works made with Smoove to any workflow, just by having a valid e-mail adress.

The release will be V0.4 and the initial price is 2.99 Dollar / 2,39 Euro. Future updates are free, and there will be a lot. In an incremental fashion.

PS: The pixels on the screenshots made by scnclr.de.

Once again did not meet the release-deadline. This made me to switching the development mode. Still I want to stay lean and agile, but at the same time also tight deadlines should be no problem at all. There is a solution to this: Kanban. The goal is to “limit work in progress“. To achieve this goal, workpackages get smaller and faster done. I made the switch some days ago, and it’s really useful! By the way: my original deadline was far away from being realistic at all, just wanted to get into the groove of ultra-ultra-tight deadlines.

With Kanban now I have one internal release every Friday. The first feedback from my own Kanban is, that I totally underestimated the task of “figuring out things” at the iPhone SDK. This SDK is huge and I spend lot of time with stuff like “how to do this” or experiences I get by try-and-error. For example: UITabBarItems are unable to show colored pictures -> UISegmentControl does this, TabBar-Items just love greyscale!

More cool resources on lean, agile and Kanban I found at agile.soup.io.

Stay lean, stay happy!

Oh boy, I am entering the most difficult phase of production: the initial version is about to be completed. Most of the time in the development I spend with other things than designing the app. It was mostly about developing tasks like reading files, writing files, flipping views.. All that dull tasks, that had to be done anyway. And it really seems, that only last days of the schedule (now) is there to actually “design” interaction and that kind of things I have in my mind for weeks. Things, that keep stressing me, is the balance of the first release: are there enough features in the editor to not bug the first buyers and testers? Or will it make sense to improve and add features, at the price of delaying the release again? At least updates will be for free (unless there is some really major changes going on). The more incremental kind of developing would not to delay, but to release. I will beforehand grab some testers anyway…

My design 
A contribution from mo.

I refreshed the Smoove Logo a little bit. After years, sometimes a little bit of polishing is fun. I am still thinking about replacing the rabbit by another animal, but still not sure about that. There is still a lot of work on this project, to get the first release done - but the wait will be worth it! Wait and see for your progress upon that.

Ok. Finally I gave the second work-in-progress game a name: Fargo! Gameplay will be between boulder-dash, interactive-stuff like physics-based games or Lemmings. Hm, and also some puzzle elements of other games. We like to mix it up!

Here is some early screenshot, but things will change nevertheless.

You can follow the progress at twitter. Keyword #fargogame.

Okay, agile development got it’s own pace. I somehow abandoned the works on “Satans Sanctuary” for now and head straight into iPhone development as well. Working on the tiles of two titles: Blackpond Fighter and some sort of Boulderdash for the iPhone. Do prototyping in Flixel - uh no… to be exact… not prototyping, but tracer code. Essential difference. Read “The Pragmatic Programmer” to get it.

Here I share one very first “concept art” of Blackpond Fighter. You can follow the progress also a little bit on twitter: #blackpondfighter.

Slowly, slowly, slowly I get really satisfied with the small details on the Nodepond-logo. Here I share the latest result.

By the way… The lettering is based upon the VAL-Freefont from the brilliant Fontfabric from Bulgaria. But I did also made changes on the typo itself to fit it my needs and make it a little more redable at smaller sizes…

So, now. Will anyone how help me clean up this design of the website a little bit?

Two relevant things happened (beside all this promising work behind the curtain):

1. Nodepond is hosting gamedesignjobs.de: A (not to say the) German freelance- and jobboard for, well, game-design-jobs in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Feel free to post your job today for free!

2. Not that new, but officially announced: Nodepond is twittering! Yes, it’s true. I have this account for a longer time now, but activated it today officially. twitter.com/nodepond.

Promising present and future:

1. I am working on some promising ideas, I’d love to share, if they reached about 80% of completion.

2. I’ll be at gamescom and gamescamp. Be there, too? Let’s meet then. Mail me or leave a comment!

3. My blog Digital Tools is about to reach the 1000 RSS-readers via Feedburner. I am about to make a very small event here in Cologne, if the point is reached. Be prepared and follow my the official DT / my private Twitter at twitter/020200 if you want to join.

Well, in short: I had to make changes. Initially I had the plan in mind, to start over with state-of-the-art pixeleditor and some other *supersecret* kind of tools. But first I underestimated the time to do not only tools, but good tools, with memory performance and usability aspects well balanced. In short: tools with heart and soul.

Nodepond-logo in 80ies mood

Meanwhile two things happend.

1. I polished my business-skills at NUK, and can call myself a NUK Alumi now. Neat. This are good news, because Nodepond is now part of the cool guys, making cool things happen.

2. Next, there was a sudden explosion in the Flash-community, named Flixel. This is a open-source game-engine in Actionscript. I ultimately fell really deeply in love with it. Programming Flixel feels so like God. I made an interview with Adam Atomic, the very creator of Flixel over at my blog Digital Tools. After all, another reason, to put the development of tools into the waiting line.

Anyway. I will come back into business with very classical things: games, games, games. The development of an upcoming title has just begun. The plan is to make a 3 level game, with some crucial storytelling. It already has a name: Satans Sanctuary. Buhahaha!!

In the last week I spend hours and hours watching the details and re-facoring everything possible in the sourcecode at Smoove. This had to go on forever, and something inside me said: No, stop it. Make a deployment, let some people play with and you will feel better. Deployment was no fun, because there were several issues (all fixed now =) ), that once again took me two days of happy (no really) debugging. Now everything works so far, but is far from beeing perfect.

But, just as I though, I really see clearer now…. and am just right now thinking about pure evil optimisation under the hood, as well as versatile new features that will make using Smoove a much more fun experience!