whatupdave

Paying by the hour was proving to be too confusing. We'd rather get people to pay for features and added value, so we moved to a much simpler pricing model!

Seems ok to me! http://www.downforeveryone.com/minefold.com

We're keeping a close eye on it ;)

Hey HN, dave from Minefold here. Would love any feedback and happy to answer any questions about our service you might have.

If you run your server in offline mode it won't validate the username with Mojang and you can add any number of bots. Just add this to your server.properties file: online-mode=false

I doubt Mojang have any sort of anti-bot policies. Individual servers can ban users though. But hopefully people are writing bots for fun and not war right? ;)

Not sure about offering it for free, it's a possibility. I may try a lite version of some type. That worked for Trainyard.

I briefly looked at Unity and thought it looked great but more suited to 3d games. I thought I could move faster with cocos2d but I can't comment on how true that is.

BTW I decided on 2d for two reasons: 1. it's easier to develop 2. I haven't found any 3d games I like!

I also hit up a whole bunch of forums, emailed a stack of review sites, most of which didn't reply, or they were charging for reviews. I got that one review I linked to which was great. I'm most definitely not a marketing guru!

I got some peverse joy out of writing code that could chunk my 3d models, send them over the bus and coordinate the two co-processors. So many late nights....

Thanks for pointing that out Mike, I've corrected the title.

You're right too, when I started development I'd just bought the iPad and there weren't a lot of quality games on the device. Especially games that weren't just scaled up iPhone games.

My reasoning was if I could get a decent game out in 3 months, even though there were less devices, I would have less competition for attention on the iPad.

I've found it to be a really great experience stepping out of a world where I felt like I was constantly re-inventing the wheel into a world where I was constantly seeing the result of a lot of eyeballs and a lot of great decisions.

Once I started relying on my tests/specs to ensure my code was working properly I started to appreciate the beauty of the code I was able to write. I also started noticing the volume of code I _didn't_ have to write.

I think you'll find it a great step forward, good luck with the job hunt!