Many of you have probably noticed (and quite a few players have commented) that the judging rate in GrandMasterPixel has become very slow in the last few months. This is frustrating since I know everyone likes to see how their pics do in the Arena quickly .. it’s pretty disheartening to submit you masterpiece, only [...]

I decided I needed to avoid losing momentum on GrandMasterPixel … so I’ve pushed through to ‘beta’ and made it available on the Android Market. I hope the server backend doesn’t melt (actually it’s hosted on Google App Engine, so I think it will be just fine .. but some optimization wouldn’t hurt ). Thanks [...]

With the design of GrandMasterPixel, I’ve generally worked on the principle that features should have to fight to be included (ala 37signals), and worked to create the bare minimum required to play the game. No more, no less. Part of that philosophy lead me to forgo the customary title screen found in many games. At [...]

So, the Game Design Concepts course officially finished a little over two weeks ago. I followed along for the first half, but dropped the ball when it came to the month-long design project. Playtesting is time consuming, but essential – and finding a bunch of ‘randoms’ to act as testers for blind playtesting is tricky. [...]

I’ve made a quick “GDCU” mindmap using XMind. It covers some of the concepts in the Game Design Concepts course, however I don’t claim that is complete, and I may update it over time. Feel free to fork it and add/correct it in any way you feel. I’d love to see updates from others doing [...]