Mark Ripley

As we near the end of developing iPhone Squeeballs, the PR machine has kicked in and stuff’s starting to emerge online. Reviews are being prepared, tweaks and polish applied, and the demand for screenshots has begun!

I’ve just uploaded them to Facebook – everyone can view them, so take a look!

Had a trip into town today, which I try to avoid as much as possible. Not only because it means hauling my arse out of bed at daft o’clock in the morning, but the Corfiots have to play a game called “guess where the police aren’t ticketing today”, as there aren’t any car parks. Well, there are, but they’re usually full, despite it being a Greek’s constitutional right to park where the hell he damn well pleases.

Anyway, part of this wonderous adventure was a visit to the British Consulate, to enquire about renewing Dee’s passport. Paranoid as they are, about being blown to pieces by some Hellenic Muslim Extremists, the Consulate is unsignposted, hidden up a set of stairs at the end of a dim alleyway. When you reach it, it’s as if you’ve been magically transported back to England.

It’s hard to put into words, but you’re first confronted by a large secure door with a CC camera. You have to press a button and state your business before they’ll even let you in. Once inside, everything reeks Englishness – the pin boards with public service posters attached, the primary-school-height tables and chairs, precisely engineered to make you feel meek and unimportant, the sort you can only find in banks and government buildings.

But what tops it off is the counter itself. You see, things are very laid back here – banks don’t have bullet proof glass rising to the ceiling, you can quite easily walk around the back of the tellers and help yourself to cash with glee, but part of Greece’s charm is that people don’t. The tellers often have their kids with them, they happily smoke and drink coffee, and generally things are very friendly (also completely incompetent, but that’s another story).

So, back to the Embassy. Bullet proof glass to the ceiling, one of those metal trays for passing documents through, and a microphone and speaker system that ensures that neither of you can understand each other. I asked about the passport, received a bundle of forms, including a sheet for the photographer, specifying exactly how the picture should be taken.

I asked where the nearest recommended photographer was. “Oh no, we couldn’t possibly do that – we’re not allowed to recommend anyone”. How typical.

Juuso got me thinking after reading his latest blog post, where he comments on pirates wanting games not only for free, but also free of advertising.

I’ve seen this with ad-funded Flash games, too. We used to have a healthy number of ads being served through Blobbit Push, but now only about 10% of game visits results in a single ad being served. That might be down to the ad server, but I’m sure it’s also down to people using ad-blocking software in their browser.

So what’s the solution? Mochi (the ad-server people) seem to be jumping on the micro-transaction bandwagon, but to be honest this is only going to be of use for a limited genre of games. There’s such a wealth of free, easily-accessible content out there (provided by aggregator sites trying to live off banner ads), that your average Joe isn’t going to be bothered with setting up and funding a micro-billing account. I know I’m not.

I’ve thought for a while now, that the only way forward for the music business is to offer their entire back catalogue online for a monthly fee – the service either provided directly, or via other “media aggregators” such as Sky. Perhaps the same should be done with games. It’ll stop the pirates – maybe. Of course the console manufacturers are already doing this, but there’s a huge market of middle-aged mums sat in front of their computer playing Diner Dash each day. It’s just starting to happen – from Casual portals such as BigFish, through to Metaboli, who offer a wide variety of PC games for 6.99 a month.

How do you pay the developers, though? Per game start-up? Per minute played? Would a developer’s share of 6.99 a month be worthwhile?

It seems that the only way forward is through closed systems – look at App Store. Again, perhaps the mobile operators can claw back their market share of app sales by offering all-you-can-eat options within their network tariffs; like they do with SMS.

Anyway, I’m waffling, back to C#.

For about a year now I’ve been dabbling in the shady world of the foreign exchange markets, better known as Forex. It’s essentially a system where you can “bet” on a certain currency pair (in my case USD against JPY) going up or down in value.

I tried it for a couple of months on demo accounts, which the various Forex trading companies give away for free in the hope of luring you in to a world of easy money and fantastic wealth. I did quite well, came up with a few strategies that seemed to work OK, then I found out about Experts….

The program you use to place your bets, also allows you to write plugins which automatically trade for you – the theory being that you’re not then stuck in front of the computer waiting to start and close trades, and it can work for you; 24 hours a day, 5 days a week.

Over the last year I’ve written, tested and tweaked loads of these things, using all sorts of mad ideas. I’ve had Bert, Ernie, BigBird, Berk, Drutt, Dougal, Fat Ern, Skinny Ern, Norman and of course, Oaf. All with various degrees of success, but all fall flat on their arse when the market plummets.

Which is precisely what it did the very day I tried it for real, with real money. It’s one thing trying stuff out on a demo account, it’s an entirely different experience when it’s for real. The market dived a couple of hours in (it turned out to be one of the biggest dives ever, just my luck!), and I did what every trader tells you not to do – get emotionally involved, panic, and try and rectify things manually.

That was last November, and since then I’ve been trying to find a solution which can cope with that sort of thing should it happen again. I’ve been testing Fat Ern for a few months now, and he copes fine, generating about 200 euros a week in revenue from the lowest “bet” you can place.

There’s only one downside – he needs 5000 euros to work properly! Better get saving my pennies

OK, so I’m sending a post from Wordpress, which will trigger a twitter post notifying people of a blog post, which will trigger a status update on Facebook, which will create a Note on Facebook, and ultimately appear in the Twitter widget on the blog front page.

Whereupon the universe will probably disappear up its own arse and implode.

Here goes….

With E3 approaching, I’ve been given the nod to rabbit on about what I’ve been working on since last November!

It’s an iPhone version of Squeeballs Party, which is released this autumn on 360, Wii and DS.

As its name suggests, the game is a collection of minigames, including Bowling, Cooking and a Paint Splat game. It’s been really fun to develop, as I’ve had to code them from scratch using Unity, using different control methods. The Squeeballs themselves are quite cute animated characters, so that’s fun to work with too. Having a complete change of game every six weeks or so is refreshing too!

There’s a gameplay video on the site, which should give a taste of what I’m up to!

I’ve still got a few more games to go, so there’s a few months to go on it yet before it’s released, but indications internally at least are that it’s going to be a good ‘un. I’ll post screenshots when things are more polished.

On the technical side, I’ve been learning all sorts of tricks and things to make the game run well on the iPhone. Luckily the upcoming release of iPhone Unity 1.1 helps a lot too – the boys in Denmark have really pulled the stops out on this release, so we can get 30-40fps with lots of models and physics going on.

As many of you are already aware, my wife Dee suffered a stroke last year. She’s currently undergoing intensive physiotherapy to gain the reuse of her right arm.

Wandering around the net over the weekend, she came across an article about a new treatment in America (called “Haptics”) which uses video games with a force-feedback joystick to retrain the brain into using the “dead” arm. Here’s the article.

Watching the video, and the simple game they use, I thought “I can do that!”. So, a trip to the computer shop later, we have a monster joystick. Twenty minutes with Unity and Happy Haptics was born!

Works better with a joystick, obviously, but you get the idea by using the arrow keys too.

Here’s a little web/iphone game I’m working on while the missus is watching Emmerdale. It’s a sort of ragdoll Rainbow Islands – with monkeys, fruit and twangy physics you just know it’s going to be fun

Click on the thumbnail for a quick play – all it does at the moment is flick him upwards when you tap the screen, but it’s fun just trying to rip the little fella’s arms off as he spins manically round the peg.

Braved the treacherous waters of the App Store submission process, to find Treasure Island (or, more likely, Fool’s Gold).

Homerun Champion on App Store

Today is the 25th anniversary of David Gilmour’s second solo album, “About Face”.

Being the sad ‘Floyd nut that I am, I bought that album on the day of release from those fine purveyors of hip choons, A&A Music on Congleton’s High Street.

I even remember the first time I listened to it, on LP of course, it being the first solo album since the Final Cut announced to the world that the Floyd were no more.

So, as I look back to sitting on my bedroom floor, reading along to the lyrics, working out the solos and chords on my guitar, I think of everything that’s happened in those 25 years, and everything I’ve yet to do.

The worst thing is, on the cover of that album, Gilmour was about the same age as I am now. Today Gilmour is an old man, and listening to that album for the first time seems like yesterday.

Oh, and it’s raining.