I’ve decided to start a new segment on the site that details a bit more of what we do around here at Tiny Tim Games. We’ve had an immense amount of help from reading the stories from other indie iPhone game developers (like NimbleBit, Retro Dreamer, and Majic Jungle), and we’d like to share our own experiences in hopes of being helpful to the indie iPhone development community (or at least to be entertaining).

First off, we submitted a quick update to Sheepstacker over this past weekend. We updated the AGON Online libraries (which now include Twitter support – yay!), and we built the game with a new version of the Unity engine, so it should be faster, better, stronger.

I’ve been continuing work on a prototype for our (hopefully) next game. It took a long time to settle on a design that: 1) wasn’t overly ambitious for a team of two working from a home office; and 2) wasn’t a complete dull-fest. We’re the picture of iterative design simply due to the number of projects that we started and threw out. One project was even in development for a full month before we finally decided to cut our losses (don’t worry, it wasn’t very fun anyways).

This particular prototype has only been in development for a little over a week, but the little bit that I have running seems to be fun, accessible, and not a 40-hour long RPG (you’d be surprised how important that is to an indie developer). We’re sticking with the “pick up and play” mentality of our earlier game Sheepstacker, but with more “hardcore gamer” sensibilities.

In particular, I’ve been focusing on the controls for the game, and I think we’ve landed on something really awesome. “Easy to learn, hard to master” sort of stuff. I’ve also been working on getting a wave management system up and running so that we can have all sorts of enemies do all sorts of things without pulling our hair out trying to put them all into the game.

Meanwhile, Shannon has been learning a bit of 3D modeling. On Sheepstacker, I was the primary modeler while Shannon did all of the texture and image works. However, when you start making a game that’s a little more complex than just “drop some sheep”, you start running out of time to do things other than programming. So she’s stepping up and taking on that primary role for this project.

We’ve decided to switch 3D packages from Blender to Cheetah 3D. While I cut my teeth on Blender and like how quickly you can make stuff in it (once you’ve learned all of the shortcuts), it’s extremely complex for someone just learning 3D to jump into, and it has more than a few issues when importing into Unity. Cheetah meanwhile has a simple interface, imports into Unity perfectly, and has all of the features that Blender has (at least for Unity game development).

That’s all for this week. Next up on the agenda: I program lots of stuff to shoot at, while Shannon draws lots of stuff to shoot at.