Rob Sandbach as Nathan Barley

Playing with iphones, FlickUp and Flickr (great combination by the way). The photo was taken, geotagged, uploaded and twittered from the iphone. Then “noted” in flickr.

Asides from the obvious “trendy 2.0 RSS junkie” persona captured in this particular composition it was interesting to think of more serious uses of this technology; say perhaps for documenting a travelling trip?

Hmm….

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Torque for iPhone Licensing Announced

http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/83134/15307

http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/83134/15307

New licensing model for GG: a pay per title approach with, essentialy, a charge for the SDK.

Indie Licensing (non-transferable, per seat, for those licensees with less than $250k annual turnover)

For current owners of TGE:
$500 for the iTGE SDK and right to publish 1 title. $100 per title thereafter. No royalties, ever.

For current owners of TGB:
$500 for the iTGB SDK and right to publish 1 title. $100 per title thereafter. No royalties, ever.

An interesting move away from their traditional “one low, up front fee for unlimited royalty free titles” approach. Also, consider that after paying $500 for your first title, Mr Jobs takes his cut of your revenue. For it to be commercially viable for a startup, bootstrap developer, you probably need to be looking at releasing a couple of titles (which with TGB especially isn’t unreasonable), and hoping one hits home in the App Store. Still, it’s a far cheaper option than building a fully functional game engine ontop of opengl es yourself eh?

As for me, I’m not all that worried about the ROI with the product. The fact that I could see my game in the app store, and play with some of the opportunities that the iPhone presents is more than enough reason to plum out $500! It’ll be interesting to see how unity responds with their iPhone compatibility.

More on that soon! (hopefully)

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Introducing chainWorks

I felt it prudent time to reintroduce a game which I’ve been “developing” on and off for about 3 years now. chainWorks is a casual, 2D game in which players produce dazzling pyrotechnic displays by detonating chains of fireworks; all from the comfort of their office chair. Such is the vision.

The game began as an experimental project to learn a new piece of software (Torque Game Builder). The game was surprisingly fun to play, and I went on to add a couple of levels, some fancy items, a score upload facility, animated backgrounds and so on. Eventually thought the fun and simple mechanic of the game was buried beneath multiple layers of addons, tweaks, visual effects and glossy razz-mataz! All of this lead to a complete rewrite on TGB 1.1.3, which was cleaner, more efficient and better coded.

Around about the time of the basic rewrite I moved away from home and went to univeristy. The project got pushed aside, zipped up and stored on an old USB pen at the bottom of a drawer. Fast forward 3 years and Torque for iPhone is announced. So this morning I dug out the old project files and fired her up. What follows is the result:

The game would work fantastically on iPhone, and this is just the push I need to pickup the title and work with it again. The mechanic is going to be tweaked slightly in line with some comments and ideas I’ve picked up from passing the basic demo around, but I think that’s a topic for another blog. For now I wanted to (re?)introduce everyone to chainWorks, and start work on version 3, which will be developed in TGB v1.7.4 and should hopefully be available on PC, Mac and iPhone some time soon!

PS

If you are a 2D artist reading this and would like to partner with me and help with some backdrop illustrations, I would love to hear from you. Please drop me a line at rob [at] indiespring.com!

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Mazda 2




Mazda 2

Originally uploaded by rob.sandbach

I took this for a test drive today, anyone want to help me fund it?

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My life on a Paper Napkin


My life on a serviette

Originally uploaded by rob.sandbach

Completed in the HRC Manchester as part of a personal development plan!

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indieSpring Launches

In light of my new job, I felt it a prudent time to launch an online blog. Whilst considering this blog, I also realised that I wanted to draw a line under all previous game development projects and pursuits and start afresh with the knowledge, ideas and enthusiasm just two months of working in web 2.0 has given me.

To this end I went through my GoDaddy domain manager and looked through all the domains I owned, a pertinant reminder of every project I’d thought up, bought a domain for and then never really got round to launching or pursuing. These domains included “indieSpring”, an idea from last year which was to produce an online site for indie developers to get together, aggregate their blogs and content, advertise their games and network to collaborate and help one another through the minefielf of independent game development.

My first instinct was to use Drupal to produce that site. Shortly thereafter I thought it a far more sensible idea to actually start a blog aimed at spreading knowledge and the indie gospel -myself- before trying to convince everyone else to! And so I grabbed Wordpress, hooked into Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and Feed Burner (after all I am a web 2.0 geek now, I need to know how things work!) and had myself a nice blog I can update and send photos to from my iPhone, pings out notifications over Twitter and Facebook upon posts, and generally is quite cool if bog standard to most blog savvy folks.

My next dilemna was what to do with the bits of game design docs, the snippets of code, the half finished games and ideas, concepts and thoughs that have accumulated across a number of projects and under a lot of different names in the last 6 years I’ve been thinking about making my own games. Well, I decided to gather them all into a big zip folder, print what was appropriate and take it as a starting point for a fresh, new initiative which can benefit from a new name, spangly new site, a decent level of funding (thanks to my job) and a better level of experience and comprehension about basic business and product development methodology. Rather than suffer the same problems of seggregation and comparmentalization of online content I’ve already grown sick of, I’m calling this new initiative “indieSpring Studios”.

So I’ve got a shiny blog, and a new logo under which to develop my first title. Strangely, flicking through those printouts and that zip folder I decided to go back to one of the first games I developed. A small, colourful fun game titled “chainWorks”, developed on TGB a couple of years back. The games format lends itself to a casual click and play game on PC or Mac, but even more so to a touch interface such as the iPhone. Cue Torque on iPhone announcement and a very, very happy developer.

And so indieSpring’s first title will be the redevelopment of chainWorks. I’m 90% sure I’ll be using TGB once more, and 100% sure that this time I’ll properly document and plan the games development and feature set. No screenies just yet, but when they come they’ll be big, shiney and explosive!

For now I’ll thank you for reading this somewhat indepth account of my recent past, and leave you with a grab of indieSpring’s new logo.

For technorati : Technorati Profile

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Welcome to indieSpring!

Welcome to indieSpring - online home of Rob Sandbach!

If you’re stopping by I would imagine you already know me and thusly lengthy introductions containing vastly over exaggerated professions of self importance and expertise would be spotted as an out right lie. It therefore remains that I’m an independent game developer, a web-techy, an online community manager and a young guy with a voracious appetite. Need I mention I’m also a geek?

indieSpring is an amalgamation of my online persona’s. It is the home of my blog, and my online game studio (until now known as Urban Games) along with various other geeky projects I’ve been pursuing for the past few years. It’s no one thing really, it’s just me online.

Bear with me as I update the site. I’ll be testing tidbits here and there as I add functionality and chop and change the layout and feel. I’ll also post up a more precise definition of what this blog will be, and who might be crazy enough to read it.

Thanks for reading and stay safe,

Rob

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