Voices That Matter hosted an iPhone development conference in Seattle this last weekend, and we were asked to participate in Saturday night’s panel discussion, as well as cover a presentation for one of the attendee’s marooned in Europe by Eyjafjallajökull

iPad Panel!

I sat in on the panel discussion along with August Trometer, Brent Simmons, Kyle Kinkade, Tim Wood, and Erica Sadun. The talk was fascinating and I personally enjoyed getting the chance to hear what my fellow panelists had to say on the matter.

Game Programming Presentation

I was also asked to stand in for Michael Daley’s Beginning Game Programming talk. I only had about a day to get ready for the presentation, and I got to the presentation a bit late* but I think that, overall, the presentation went very well, and that the audience had great energy.

I tried to make sure that the material Michael had in his original presentation was honored as much as possible, and also added in some of my own thoughts about the logistics of designing your own game and bringing it to market, how one assesses the technology choices to use in a game, and some approaches for building up the skill sets required to create great games.

Sample code from the presentation

I wanted the presentation to be genuinely useful, with some concrete examples of the concepts I’d discussed, so I pulled together a demonstration application late Friday night to show at the presentation. Bil Moorhead, our CTO, showed up to help cover a few of the technical issues, including sprite animation, one of his specialties.

The application is a basic Breakout game for the iPad, using OpenGL ES 2.0 for the graphics and the Box2D physics engine for dynamics and collision handling. The code uses some of the es utilities created by the authors of the OpenGL ES 2.0 book, along with some paddle control code from Ray Wenderlich, who’s own version of Breakout Cocos2D on the same game I discovered late in the game while working on the demo on Saturday night.

I have posted the project on github under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Loosely speaking, people are free to use this any way that they want, but we expect to get a shout out if this code gets used in other people’s projects or applications.

The slide deck from my presentation is available here if anyone is interested in seeing it.

Thanks to everyone for helping to make this happen, it was a wonderful time.

*A giant ‘thank you’ to Erica Sadun for keeping the group entertained until I got there. You’re a lifesaver!