It’s official, we will have a booth in the indie game section of the TooManyGames East Coast Gaming Expo on June 14-16. We’ll be sharing the upcoming launch of bringing our iOS survival space shooting game, Ace Omicron, to the Mac.

If you’re in the NYC, NJ, PA area, you’ll have a fun time. There are video game and card game tournaments, LAN parties, panels, and showcases. In the marketplace area there’s plenty of vendors with classic games and merchandise, people that make game-inspired clothes and artwork, James Rolfe (The Angry Video Game Nerd) will be signing autographs, and there will be a bunch of indie game developers sharing their games.

Hope to see you there!
– Casey

So far, so good. It’s been pretty cool working in it. After the small learning curve in understanding some of the advanced features, the tool seems very useful for creating engaging content. The widgets are definitely useful to switch up the experience for the user and keep things fresh. And, the inclusion of importing custom html 5 content provides a limitless avenue for enabling completely unique interactive experiences.

It’s a new year and time to start blogging once again. Today’s topic is about computer backup. If you’re a digital creator, I can’t stress how important data backup is. There are primarily two parts of data backup that will keep you up and running with minimal downtime. The first part is a cloned/bootable hard drive to keep your machine running. The second part is your data; and that’s what I’m going to talk about today.

There are two kinds of data backup: local and remote. Both Mac and Windows have built-in applications that work with “local” external USB, firewire, and eSATA drives. There are also a bunch of “free” back-up software packages that run from your computer. However, in the past couple years, the cost of remote/cloud-based backup has incredibly declined. For instance, CrashPlan+ which support file versioning, unlimited data, access to restore your data from any web-enabled computer, and next day delivery of your data (if you have a catastrophic crash) is around $50/year.

Most importantly, a very high percentage of designers and artists are primarily moving to working on laptops and from multiple locations. This growing laptop trend changes the dynamic of backup and what the user has access to when working from different locations. They may also not have room to attach external drives. I’ve been personally using CrashPlan+ for over a year and it’s been great! Now there are other web services out there (such as mozy.com) that offer low-cost, cloud-based backup to check out.

The key thing is to seriously start thinking about remote/cloud-based backup as part of your strategy to safeguard your creative data.

One major challenge I have encountered in this foray into cross-platform development has been getting consistent debugging and analysis information. Doing this on one platform can be tough enough, but when doing it across different platforms, there aren’t many consistent tools or standards.

Summarizing my needs:
1) I need consistent, fast text output for debugging.
2) I need clear messages from my program which indicate what went wrong.
3) I would like some kind of performance profiling tool, to measure what parts are too slow, so I can optimize them.
4) I would like to have some idea about what my RAM usage is, to help spot memory leaks.