Here Come E3 and WWDC! Going? Let’s Meet Up!

The next few weeks are going to be exciting for the iPhone community. First up we have E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo in LA. This huge video game conference is where all of the great hardware and games get announced for the year. While the iPhone isn’t going to play a major role in this show, it will likely make a larger showing than any other mobile phone has in the past. We’ll be reporting from the show any fantastic things we come across.

The week following that, WWDC will be in San Francisco. This yearly developers conference hosted by Apple is where all the big iPhone news comes out. Or at least it has in the past. While rumors are mixed, we could see the release of the 3.0 OS, and maybe even a new iPhone or two. We’ll keep you posted.

148Apps will be a sponsor the the second iPhone Developers Union meet up at WWDC. The event will be held at Jillians in the Metreon on Monday night, June 8th at 7pm. For more information, see the @iPhoneDevUnion Twitter stream.

If you’re an iPhone developer, we’d love to meet up with you at either conference and see what you are working on. Just let us know what time is good for you. Send us an email or hit us up on Twitter.

GDC 2009 Wrap-up – iPhone Games Coming on Strong

If it’s one thing that GDC taught me it’s that the iPhone has a long way to go as a game console. It’s still a tiny little player in the whole gigantic video games world. But in the nine months since the app store launch, it has made some great strides.

For one thing, the iPhone totally dominated the Independent Games Festival Mobile awards. Not only did they will all the categories, they had most of the nominations as well. The iPhone is now, as far as most are concerned, the best mobile phone platform to develop on. As one developer put it, finally a mobile platform that doesn’t suck.

This past week we did get many clues about what 2009 will bring for iPhone games. First, this will be the year the big boys go full force after the iPhone market. EA, Chillingo, Glu, and others have announced some huge portfolios of games coming out this year.

We will also see an explosion in backend community systems, think XBox Live for your iPhone, and probably some consolidation of those services as well. Consumers aren’t best served by having multiple community systems, everyone knows that, but who will win out as the best? With GameSpy announcing they are bringing over their backend that already powers many console and desktop titles, they will likely start out in the lead. Then ngmoco announced they were opening up their platform to third party developers, another strong contender, but no release date announced. Then you have the underdogs such as OpenFeint, ByteClub, and a new contender, Agon. Then there’s also the Facebook Connect for iPhone that many systems are using. It’s not purely a gaming system, but many have adapted it. A force for sure, with Facebook having over 160 million users.

We also were fortunate to meet with some really cool developers and get a sneak peak at some of the great games coming out in the not too distant future.

Real Racing from Firemint
Release Date: Late April, 2009 at an unknown price
Without a doubt, the best we saw was Real Racing from Firemint. Real Racing is a racing game just short of a racing sim. It’s ultra-realistic and features some amazing community and asynchronous multiplayer modes. You even have the ability to publish hot laps to YouTube, automatically. The controls by default work great and are very responsive. This is one to watch for. Firemint are being close to the chest with the price on this one, but it will be released late April.

Touch Pets from ngmoco
Release Date: unknown
I’ll have to admit I was originally nonplussed on Touch Pets. But after spending some time with it I can see what the excitement it about it. For one this, this game is deep. There’s lots to do, lots of things to collect, there are missions to go on, there are achievements, tons of stuff. But above all, this game has a social aspect that could set it apart from all of the other virtual pet type games. This all ads up to a game that will be very enormously engrossing to many people, maybe even me.

Star Defense from ngmoco
Release Date: pretty soon at an unknown price
Tower Defense games are filling up the app store quickly. And many are really good. Star Defense takes a slightly different direction and adds 3D to the standard game. So instead of playing tower defense on a flat landscape, you play it on a 3D world. One of the more interesting parts of this is that, in one level, you are playing on a cube instead of a sphere. This basically divides up each level into 6 parts as you have to place defense on each of the sides since the weapons don’t seem to work around the corners of the cube. The game itself seems really well done and stable, and should be released soon. We’ll give it more playtime when it comes out and get a full review.

Star Trader: Moon Madness from HermitWorks
Release Date: very soon at $0.99
This game is an expanded version of the DopeWars genre that I’m sure everyone is familiar with. But it’s set in outerspace and uses the Quake engine to provide a 3D world where you can walk around and barter. The controls are a modified 2 location virtual touch pad as we’ve seen on other games and works well for movement and changing the angle you are viewing the world. The developers are releasing this at $0.99 and will be raising the price as they add features such as multiplayer in the future.

All in all a fantastic GDC. Had to great opportunity to speak with some amazing people. We’ll try to get full reviews of these games up as soon as they are available.

360|iDev Roundup

The 360|iDev conference has just wrapped up, and it’s been a great one. The three day conference which had ticket prices as low as $200 (a steal!), was attended by roughly 150 developers. Talks were divided roughly into 4 different tracks including business, game development, non-game development, and hands-on. Everyone attending the conference we talked to were very impressed with both the organization of the conference and the quality of the speakers.

360|iDev has a sense of community much more so than most developer conferences. The community feel puts everyone at ease and allows greater participation than a larger conference like WWDC. 360|iDev is put on by a duo of part-time conference organizers, they’ve done a fantastic job, we’re already looking forward to the next one.

“Some of the best and brightest iPhone and Apple development community in one conference. It’s fantastic. I’m looking forward to the next one.” said Keith Shepherd from Imangi Studios, developer of Imangi and Little Red Sled.

The organizers are looking to have another 360iDev conference in about 6 months, this time on the other side of the Mississippi river. I’d suggest following them on Twitter to keep informed of the next one.

Upcoming iPhone Developer Conferences

March is loaded with conferences related to iPhone development. There are three major conferences going on in the San Francisco bay area alone. Let us know if you are headed to any of these, I’ll be at all three and would love to meet up.

360iDev
March 2 – 4, 2009 – San Jose, CA
More info: http://www.360conferences.com/360iDev/

First up is the 360iDev conference. This conference is a little looser than that most, but it’s 100% iPhone specific. Some great sessions are already scheduled. Topics include everything from development specifics, business aspects, even a session on iTunes Connect. On top of that, it’s an amazingly cheap conference considering the 3+ days length.

The pricing of the tickets is tiered based on when the tickets are sold. The first 100 tickets at $200, then 200 tickets at $350 and the 100 tickets at $499.  Some of the $200 tickets are still available, grab them now while you still can.

iGames Summit 2009
March 19, 2009 from 12:00 PM – 5:15 PM (PST) – San Francisco, CA
More info: http://www.igsummit.com/

The iGames Summit promises to be a very interesting, though short conference. This 1/2 conference in San Francisco has some real heavy hitters lined up to speak. Scheduled to speak include Neil Young from ngmoco, Andrew Lacy from Tapulous, Ge Wang from smule, Mike Pagano from EA Mobile, and many more. Check out the site for the full lineup.

Tickets are still available for this conference, earlybird tickets are $299 until February 19th. You can save 15% on General Admission Tickets when they go on sale (after 2/19) if you use the code 148APPS at checkout.

Game Developers Conference / GDC
March 23-27, 2009 – San Francisco, CA
More info: http://gdconf.com

The grand daddy of all game developer conferences. This one is huge. While not iPhone centric, game developer centric, there will undoubtedly be plenty of iPhone discussion going on. This 5 day conference is the place to learn about the latest technologies in game development. It includes multiple courses from Business, Audio, Game Design, Production, Programming, and Visual Arts.

I’m going to be at all of these conferences. If you are going to be there and would like to meet up, maybe to show me what you are working on, send me a message via Twitter @148Apps or an email at review dot monkey (at) 148apps dot com. Looking forward to meeting more of the great iPhone developers.