This is no GDC or  WWDC, which is a fantastic thing. Those conferences are huge, overwhelming, and you can’t get into all the talks. 360 is small enough that you’ll be able to meet the majority of people there if you make the effort, and you’ll certainly be able to speak at length with many speakers and attendees. Its such a friendly conference, people will help you design your game, solve bugs, give you ideas for your next app, try to hire you, and want to join your team. Above all else this is a great place to go if you are trying to make it in the app store. Its a good mix of people from passionate newbies through to big time app store success stories. Seriously, coming to 360 will raise your game, and you’ll make back a lot more than the ticket price in increased sales and better work.

One of the focuses this year is on consulting & contracting. John and Nicole have lined up a handful of us to speak on how to make it as an iOS consultant / contractor. Rob and I will be giving advice on how to get good clients and filter out waste of time projects, how to negotiate good agreements, how to structure projects to decreased risk for both parties, and how to stay ahead of the curve and demand good rates. Of course you can ask us all about our publishing businesses too like ROI from translating apps into other languages, how we promote apps, pricing models and pricing psychology, app store ranks, the state of mobile advertising, working with Unity 3D, …

I hear its closing on selling out this year, so check out the full schedule, and then get a ticket and book flights and hotels. Looking forward to seeing you there :-).

• Free to play on the web
• Santa’s Lil Zombies Free, with 3 levels and iAds.
• Santa’s Lil Zombies, 99c with 8 epic zombies blasting levels.

This casual iPhone game is full 3D but designed to be super easy for anyone to pick-up-and-play. Its a portrait mode game leaving room for iAds, and you can play one handed by holding the phone and aiming the gun with your thumb. Its very easy, in our player tests, even non-gamers who don’t have iPhones were able to get into the game quickly. As we built it with the most awesome Unity 3D, its easy to publish it on the web, so santaslilzombies.com has a full free demo of the first 3 levels of the game.

Suzanne Ginsburg’s ‘Designing the iPhone User Experience‘ is another worthy read. Its 277 pages cover iPhone apps from the point of view of a UI specialist and includes tons of good advice about market research by, prototyping, testing, how to approach the overall app design, UI design, and branding. On my first look through I feared it was another manual of ‘how the pros do it’ that would not suit the resources of my own two person company, but on closer inspection that’s not the case at all. When the author does explain bigger budget approaches she also explains low budget ‘guerilla’ methods. There are tips and anecdotes throughout the book drawn from Susanne’s experience working on iPhone app design and UI testing. (Suzanne is an acomplished user experience consultant in Silicon Valley.)

One piece of advice about listening to designers… They have a lot to say about things you should do, and stuff you should put into you app. All those ‘shoulds’ are scary to an indie software developer short on time and money and focused mainly on writing code. Think of all the ‘shoulds’ as a menu of stuff you can consider, and then spend your time and money where it makes sense for you. Remember though, end users don’t care one bit how costly or time consuming an app is, they only care how delightful, fun, and useful the app is, and your app is going to be competing against apps that have had a lot of careful design put into them.

For those of you who can’t get enough I’d like to recommend a couple more design books, though they are not iPhone books. ‘The Design of Everyday Things‘by D Norman is an industrial design classic. As the iPone is a device you hold and touch, the app design direction of physical / real world metaphor has proved very successful for a number of apps, and Norman’s book is probably the best design guidance you will find for that kind of app.

‘Don’t Make Me Think‘ is a concise and accessible book on web usability design, it has some great lessons that iPhone designers can use too that might be a little easier to learn when seen in the context of the more familiar web.

Finally a quick mention of ‘Design Basics Index‘ by Jim Krause, which is a useful intro and reference for graphic design concepts that’s helpful to those of us without training in graphic design.

More book recommendations: iOS Programming, Games & Unity, Marketing & Business.

Scott Rogers’ ‘Level Up, The Guide To Great Video Game Design‘ is my second recommendation for game makers. Its a much bigger book that Koster’s and instead of looking at the heart of what gaming is in the player’s mind, the book takes a hands on look at the elements of computer games: characters, camera, controls, UI, cevels, combat, game mechanics, audio, etc. Its also a very readable book with lots of cartoons, and it will help you understand what you are building in terms of the conventions of all the games that came before, from which your players learned how to play computer games. Its an excellent resource to help you understand some of your choices when you get stuck with some part of your game’s design, and it will help you round out parts of your game you’ve neglected.

Finally on general game design, I’d like to give a shout out to Nicole Lazzaro. I don’t think she’s written a book yet, but go hear her speak if you can, and get her papers on the 4 Keys to Fun at her website XeoDesign.com.

Typically games means animated 2D or 3D graphics, and you’d be a fool to write a game from scratch without using a game engine. There are a bunch of excellent game engines on the iOS platform, but undoubtedly the two leaders are Unity 3D and Cocos2D (with Box2D or Chipmunk Physics). After writing our first iPhone game from scratch in C and Open GL ES, we’ve now chosen Unity 3D for our next games, and I have to tell you so far its amazing, brilliant, excellent value for money, and totally fun to use! Despite the name, Unity 3D is good for 2D games too (check out Sprite Manager 2). It speaks volumes about Unity that there are several books now available to help you learn to harness it…

Unity Game Development Essentials by Will Goldstone, and Unity 3D Game Development by Example are two good beginners books, feel free to select either one or both to get started in creating Unity scenes, scripting objects, and making basic games. Unity Game Development Essentials introduces everything by working through the building of a simple first person perspective game where you walk around an island and interact with the 3D world. The example game the book takes you through can’t be run on the iPhone though, as it makes use of the terrain modeling features of Unity which are not supported on iOS. Unity 3D Game Development by Example on the other hand takes you through building a handful of casual games without using any features that aren’t supported in iOS. The book is aimed not just at Unity beginners, but at beginner programmers too, and it a very easy to follow. If you are an experienced programmer you might find it a bit annoying, and in fact the authors very casual style ends up detracting from the book a little because the humorous section titles just make it hard to look up Unity stuff you need help with.

‘Creating 3D Game Art for the iPhone with Unity, Featuring modo and Blender Pipelines‘ by Wes McDermott is a fantastic book to help you get to grips with Unity. From the title you might think this book is for game artists about 3D modeling, but really the title could have been ‘Everything technical you need to know about making 3D games with Unity for iPhone except programming’. It will teach you how to use 3D models, animation, and textures in Unity whether you are creating them yourself, using stock, or hiring a 3D artist. Also, despite the fact that modo and Blender are in the title, this book is for you whether you use those applications or not. The book explains the power and limitations of Unity on the iPhone and has great advice on how to get good graphical performance. It teaches how to use all the different settings for importing graphics into Unity so they will work well on iPhone, and explains some performant techniques for constructing the game world. The author takes you through all this by building up an animated 3D over the shoulder perspective shooter game.

More book recommendations: iOS Programming, App Design,  Marketing & Business.