First! Here's a link to my scratch game from last time. It's pretty much a study in parallax scrolling. And sheep.

Second! My dev diary has been a little off-the-board this week. This is mainly because I was on a panel at FITC this year and, let's face it, conferences are like beautiful black holes that take up all your attention (in a very good way). Plus, I got to learn some interesting things and talk to some very awesome people. All in all, a good time. Kudos to the FITC crowd for a conference well done.

However, it also means I've done close to nothing this week in the realm of indie game-building. BUT! I did spend a chunk of time playing with some tools, which makes sense coming off the heels of techy design conference.

Off the bat there's Game Maker, a $20 piece o' software that's great for building games with simpler concepts. It's the indie game builder/middleware of choice for many a game maker (nyuk nyuk) out there. Playing with it is sort of like a combo of playing with scratch + flash; it has a coding aspect to it (which feels a lot like JS/AS2) but it also has a lot of drag and drop items to assist you. Its easy to pick up, but in classic Windows software-ness, has a utilitarian-ish feeling to it. Also: tree view! WTF is up w/PCs and that god damn tree view?? I swear they're driving me nuts, maybe they're trying to be enviro-friendly? Either way I get lost in all the branches. bleh.

Anyways, to get this to work I had to partition and install XP on my mac. The experience was... weird. And difficult due to the fact that my drive had to be re-formatted. Not fun. :-/ The 1.5 days of tech dumbness spurred me to go look at possible mac middleware, and there's not much that's comparable to Game Maker for OSX. If you are willing to drop about $200, however, you have at least two decent options:

1- Torque Game Builder. Looks strong, but scores a shit-minus for documentation. I downloaded its demo to poke around but it took me a while to find some good tutorials. If you want to move past game maker for a 2d idea, though, Torque could very well be right for you. I kind of want to use it, but I feel its got a bit too much oomph for my current project and its time line. It's also super-heavy on scripting.

2- Unity3d. HOLY SCHLEMELE!! yeah that's all i gotta say here. This is pretty much a full 3d engine for $200. I messed around with it a bit, and I think i'd like to revisit it in the future. Not even for games necessarily but just to make weird little rendered levels.

So that's it for now. Hopefully, there'll be more cakes and raccoons next time around. In the mean time, check out the other entries in this series, and let me know if you have any other OSX middleware recommendations.