MacWorld SF 2005 - mini, Shuffle and more...

#1 Welcome Jay! Mac family is getting bigger and bigger every single day.

#2 Jay. Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to have Alex seduce the Apple booth people with his long blond hair while you get all of the Mac mini's you can fit into the back of the get-away car, in this case, Jay's truck. This is your primary objective. Should you fail in this objective (should you chose to accept the mission in the first place), just grab some of the new iPod Shuffles and run like hell.

This post will self destruct in 10 seconds.

#3 Jay what about other the other games that you guys brought with you? You seemed to have missed any mention of them here in your post. Also how are people recieving them and the idea of indie games and how does this year compare to others?

Keep us updated buddy we all wish we could be there with ya.

Edit: fixed grammer so that I don't sound like a complete idiot :)

#4 I saw those Mini's on the apple site. At $500 they are nearly a no brainer for developers looking to do cross platform game development. Hook that up to a KVM switch and you have a powerful crossplatform development environment, especially with the small size and relatively powerful CPU of the Mini.

#5 Wow they are going to get some market back with the Mac Mini! and also get new customers to the mac world at that price

#6 Jay, log back in and give us an update so I can go to bed!

#7 Steven - I have official business to do in the evenings (translate that to smoozing at parties). It was a great day for GG and the energy at MacWorld has definately changed.

Alex and I got our first chance to showoff today with a session at 2:30 on the Game stage that Apple has setup. It was a 'blast' we showed Marble Blast Gold - only one or two people in the initial aucience raised their hands for having heard of GG, but more hands went up when it came to MBG. We'd planned to kick it off with a Torque demo, but had to redownload it while we played with MB (I swore it worked last night, but as any presenter knows you just have to stay flexible). We circled back got to do a walk-through of Torque and then moved quickly to showoff the Torque ShowTool Pro bringing in a tank and 'shedding light' on how game art is made... before everyone's eyes glazed over we moved back to show off ThinkTanks and then rounded it up with Zap! (inviting everyone over to see DH: L in the arcade). We'll try to slip in a bit of dRacer tomorrow and I wasn't able to answer the question of 'when will GravRally ship?'.

It was a frenetic day - as Alex bounced between Lore and Zap! - I bounced over to interview on GameSpot Live before doing a one hour presentation on Torque with Jeannie Novak who was conducting a Game Development tutorial workshop covering much of the material in her book from Thomson Delmar called "Game Development Essentials". After that I actually got to see a few booths on the floor and ran into a number of old collegues from my Learning Services/Educational Technology Mrktg days.

It was very fun to float by the Apple booth and get to pull up Marble Blast on a mini right along with Pages and GarageBand - saw a few others discovering us as well. After giving Alex a quick break it was time for the show to close at six - did dinner with a group of aspiring game developers and then enjoyed the 'Peoples Party' - it was crowded, but they had a good bar and I enjoyed at least one Long Island for Jeff. For those that know me, they know its easy to push a button and get me talking about whats going on over in 'the Garage' and I got to do that throughout the night. There are many people waiting for our next game and I would have never imagined the excitement about Torque 2D would be soo strong, the excitement is palpable with those I've talked about it with at MacWorld. There are times I believe even I underhype the power that Torque represents on OS X - there just isn't anything in its class (although we received a well intentioned 'we're going to kick your ass' verbal threat today from a game developer who is planning on bringing an engine to market).

Everyday is a great day to be a GarageGamer... today was just especially sweet.

#8 Awesome report. It looks like that mac mini is going to taka over the world. I want one! Mac game demand is going to go through the roof. At least, Criswell predicts...

#9 Sounds like a excellent Day Jay

#10 Very exciting... the mini looks to be a great solution for mac development

#11 I'd say both as a dev. machine and as a great platform for indie games (we can make a ATI 9200 with 32MB sing and dance) I agree that Mac Mini is awesome ... more awesome since it has Marble Blast Gold on it, but in the words of Josh, its just such a 'cool sweet awesome' machine.

#12 @Jay: I would beg to differ on one thing: a video card with only 32M of memory is like selling this thing with 1 2 Meg hard drive. Ok, that's probably over-drastic, but still.

Sure it's usable, and will probably do what you need for the most part, but it is quite limiting in that one case, especially as a dev platform, since almost always you need to shoot for "beyond the bleeding edge" in target platforms in some project lifecycles.

I'll be getting one simply because our Mac port is totally stalled, and this is a great price range for me to simply buy for the express purpose of maintaining a Mac port of our project, but we certainly won't be using that size card as an expectation of target platforms for even a project released next month--does that make sense?

Now, if the card could be replaced easily, it wouldn't be an issue at all, but as far as I can tell, there's the rub.

#13 The biggest issue will be testing High End macs... it should be great for testing lower settings of a game and for overall compatability for macs... but will probably have to shell out the big bucks if you want to make a "bleeding edge" mac game (though this is great for the low end testing of that)

#14 Greetings!

Jay, it's great to hear that TST Pro received some demo time. I wish I were there to see it on the big screen.

The Mini sounds like an awesome low-end development machine. It's essentially the same as the eMac I have sitting beside me -- just a lot smaller and without the display. If I didn't already have my eMac for development, I'd pick this puppy up.

As far as it not being the bleeding edge...I think that's the point. If you're developing for future "standard" hardware, then you'll need to shell out the big bucks regardless of operating system/platform. I don't think there's any way around that.

- LightWave Dave

#15 @David--I don't have a problem with that concept generally, except for simply the card they decided to include. When was the last time anyone actually bought a 32 Meg graphics card of any type?

Mine was easily 5 years ago...

#16 @Stephen: true... which comes to one of the weaknesses of Macs in the past and even if they are getting better they still have some ways to go -- supporting games

#17 @Jay: I know how hectic things are and how absolutely nuts you two must be right now, but do you have any more feedback on how things are progressing?

I'm especially interested myself in how the games being demo'ed are being received from both the purchaser and the "exec" levels, as well as a general feeling for how well TGE is being seen/accepted in the general audience.

Thanks, and keep up the awesome work!

#18 Arggh, 32 meg card? It's like they're actively trying to avoid graphics innovation on Macs. This reduces our incentive to bring TSE to Mac. The demo won't even run on 32 megs.

The mini will be a good thing for Apple overall though, probably very good.

#19 true @ Brian, though keep in mind there are other solutions for mac gaming... the mini will be a simple, well priced, small space consuming dev platform for low end graphical games... making it ideal for T2D I'd say