Okay, agile development got it’s own pace. I somehow abandoned the works on “Satans Sanctuary” for now and head straight into iPhone development as well. Working on the tiles of two titles: Blackpond Fighter and some sort of Boulderdash for the iPhone. Do prototyping in Flixel - uh no… to be exact… not prototyping, but tracer code. Essential difference. Read “The Pragmatic Programmer” to get it.

Here I share one very first “concept art” of Blackpond Fighter. You can follow the progress also a little bit on twitter: #blackpondfighter.

Slowly, slowly, slowly I get really satisfied with the small details on the Nodepond-logo. Here I share the latest result.

By the way… The lettering is based upon the VAL-Freefont from the brilliant Fontfabric from Bulgaria. But I did also made changes on the typo itself to fit it my needs and make it a little more redable at smaller sizes…

So, now. Will anyone how help me clean up this design of the website a little bit?

Two relevant things happened (beside all this promising work behind the curtain):

1. Nodepond is hosting gamedesignjobs.de: A (not to say the) German freelance- and jobboard for, well, game-design-jobs in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Feel free to post your job today for free!

2. Not that new, but officially announced: Nodepond is twittering! Yes, it’s true. I have this account for a longer time now, but activated it today officially. twitter.com/nodepond.

Promising present and future:

1. I am working on some promising ideas, I’d love to share, if they reached about 80% of completion.

2. I’ll be at gamescom and gamescamp. Be there, too? Let’s meet then. Mail me or leave a comment!

3. My blog Digital Tools is about to reach the 1000 RSS-readers via Feedburner. I am about to make a very small event here in Cologne, if the point is reached. Be prepared and follow my the official DT / my private Twitter at twitter/020200 if you want to join.

Well, in short: I had to make changes. Initially I had the plan in mind, to start over with state-of-the-art pixeleditor and some other *supersecret* kind of tools. But first I underestimated the time to do not only tools, but good tools, with memory performance and usability aspects well balanced. In short: tools with heart and soul.

Nodepond-logo in 80ies mood

Meanwhile two things happend.

1. I polished my business-skills at NUK, and can call myself a NUK Alumi now. Neat. This are good news, because Nodepond is now part of the cool guys, making cool things happen.

2. Next, there was a sudden explosion in the Flash-community, named Flixel. This is a open-source game-engine in Actionscript. I ultimately fell really deeply in love with it. Programming Flixel feels so like God. I made an interview with Adam Atomic, the very creator of Flixel over at my blog Digital Tools. After all, another reason, to put the development of tools into the waiting line.

Anyway. I will come back into business with very classical things: games, games, games. The development of an upcoming title has just begun. The plan is to make a 3 level game, with some crucial storytelling. It already has a name: Satans Sanctuary. Buhahaha!!

In the last week I spend hours and hours watching the details and re-facoring everything possible in the sourcecode at Smoove. This had to go on forever, and something inside me said: No, stop it. Make a deployment, let some people play with and you will feel better. Deployment was no fun, because there were several issues (all fixed now =) ), that once again took me two days of happy (no really) debugging. Now everything works so far, but is far from beeing perfect.

But, just as I though, I really see clearer now…. and am just right now thinking about pure evil optimisation under the hood, as well as versatile new features that will make using Smoove a much more fun experience!