The biggest news of the week was definitely the announcement that Unity basic is now free. This should mean a huge influx of users, and hopefully some really great games coming out using the Unity technology.

Brian gave two talks at the show. The first, discussed how to make money on iPhone Games, and definitely tried to give good knowledge, insight, and real data for the audience. The Mechtley brothers of Touch KO fame were on the panel, as was Martin Schultz from Decane and Matthew Gravell from Graveck (10 Balls, 7 Cups and Skee-Ball).

On Friday Brian gave a talk called Get your Cocoa On which covered integrating Cocoa into Unity games for iPhone. It was a very technical talk, but the initial feedback seemed positive and hopefully it proves to be useful. The notes for this talk are up on Brian’s personal site now.

Overall this was a very enjoyable event. The crowd at Unite was mostly indies, and they all seemed to genuinely love the technology and love what they do. The raw passion for the games being made is something that is harder to find at bigger events like GDC or even Casual Connect.

On a more practical level Brian will be presenting “Get your Cocoa On” on Friday at 1:30. This is going to be a very technical talk covering ways to integrate Cocoa development into a Unity game development pipeline. This is extremely important for any developers that want to take advantage of various libraries and things that the iPhone offers, which aren’t natively supported within Unity.

If you’re going to be in San Francisco this week, let us know and we’d love to meet up.

I used to pride myself on being able to develop games very quickly and just focus on getting things done. In fact at my first job at CleverMedia we would release a game every Thursday, and occasionally spend just a single day getting the game done. The focus there was to build a game, get it up and move on to the next one. However it’s been several years since I’ve tried to do something that fast, and it was definitely a challenge to get back into the mindset.

What went right?

Team comfort Eric, Jonathan and I have all worked together at our previous job, and know what each other brings to the table, and we know how each other works. We certainly weren’t like Team Phobic with their full team of 7 there, but we didn’t have to spend any time getting to know one another or anything like that, and this made a big difference.

Subversion A few hours before this started I setup a local SVN server on my laptop that we could use that night. The Internet connection was a bit flaky and I wanted to have an easy way to share our code with each other. This worked out brilliantly as the 3 of us were working. We only had a couple minor conflicts through the night, and those were very quickly resolved. Without SVN setup we probably would have wasted a couple hours through the night trying to integrate code, and keep everyone on the same page.

Having an idea We started off the night with 3 ideas we thought about building but almost immediately decided on Gravity Sling and never looked back. We just focused on that, and tried to see how far we could take it.

Splitting up Responsibilities Almost immediately we determined who would be working on what parts of the project, and we generally stuck to that as we went. Eric did the art, Jonathan did the core physics and I wrote all the framework and interface stuff. This kept us each focused on our specific areas, and we could see how everything was coming along, even when we couldn’t integrate everything together. I was a bit worried at 3am when everything was still very separate pieces, but once things started to come together around 4am they came together very quickly.

What didn’t go right?

Honestly, not much given the timeframe, and goals. We had hoped to have a game complete enough to submit to Apple at the end of the night, and we didn’t quite get there so I guess that’s what didn’t go right. We did get to a point of having a very solid initial prototype of gameplay, and just need to finish it up before we can submit to Apple.

What’s next?

We’ve talked about it and we all want to finish this up, so we’re going to tweak Gravity Sling a bit, build out some more levels, and put some additional polish into the overall experience, and then we’ll get it submitted to Apple so the whole world can see the final result.

Wrapping Up

The feedback and response on Twitter has been great. Dan Grigsby at Mobile Orchard covered the event as we were getting started (and took 3 hours to get it posted thanks to the poor hotel Internet). Peter Bakhirev at Byteclub posted about how to survive a Game Jam event and it looks like Mac Most and Touch Arcade will be covering the results in some way too.

You can check out all of the Projects on the iPhone Game Jam site too.

Thanks to Noel Llopis of Snappy Touch for getting this organized, and John and Tom hosts of 360iDev for letting us do this!

Overall it was a lot of fun, and I’m definitely looking forward to the next one!

Overall the show was a lot of fun, and the quality of people attending was extremely high. The coverage of next gen platforms was also very good, and I learned a lot about Android and webOS development too. We’re currently looking into doing some webOS game development for the Palm Pre and Pixi, so you’ll likely see more about that coming from us soon.

If you’re going to be in Toronto for this, or any other reason get in touch so we can meet up.