Show initiative.
Take an active and open disposition.
Assume nothing is chiseled in stone.
Be fair to yourself and others.
Set your own rules rather than blindly following someone elses.

It wasn't game development, but back when I was writing for webcomics I managed to attract an artist by using the methods mentioned above - I pretty much just started posting bits of my concept pitch for the comic on a related forum, and kept going until someone spoke up that liked it and wanted to work on it.

That said, a programmer is going to be a lot more discerning than a webcomic artist regarding whether you actually have an idea about how to make games from start to finish or not - ideas, as has been said, are a dime a dozen, but someone having the ability to follow their idea through to completion is much rarer.

Also I'm guessing most indie programmers, if they do agree to work with you, will definitely prefer the creative relationship to be contributory as opposed to you directing the production. For instance, the idea for the project that I'm working on was pitched by an artist friend to me, and sounded good enough to go ahead on, but it's evolved so far from that original pitch due to both of our ideas and input that it barely resembles the original document.

HTH!

PS: I find that when I'm on the hunt, a sacrificial squirrel usually does it for me - but that's just a personal preference.

[super [super function]]. Sigh.

There may be a better way than this, but this will work:

Code:

    IMP gp_print = [GrandParent instanceMethodForSelector:@selector(print)];
   
    [super print]; /* Call parent */
    gp_print(self, @selector(print)); /* Call grandparent */

Ahh, thanks for that! Still not totally ideal, but at least there's a way. I guess if I was calling it every frame I might keep it in a class member NSInvocation or whatevs. Anyway, cheers

Grumpy ey? Well, at the moment I'm grumpy that Objective C uses super calls to their super classes. Why can't it just be like C++ where you specify which super class's method you call next, so that you can potentially skip some?

(Although I guess I may be able to do this by calling something like [super [super function]]. Sigh.

Just from personal experience, I tend to find XCode fairly straight forward and not too confusing - I think it's definitely laid out in a more user friendly manner when compared with Visual Studio. It also seems to scale to different sized projects fairly well. I have a feeling that once you actually get your feet wet with XCode you'll find that the deep end isn't as treacherous as you may have imagined

Wow, great thread, I'll be mining it for comicy goodness in the future.

I only recently started getting into comics - I've just read Watchmen, Killing Joke and Sandman Vol. 1 (oh, and Understanding Comics).

Will probably continue delving into smaller, complete works - don't really have the time or energy to get into any epic series. But yeah, it's a cool art form :D

Derek mentioned in his tutorial that Unity 3D took a bit of effort to get working with 2D. I'm in the process of making a 2D iPhone game, and cocos2d has been a fantastic (and free!) solution for me, so I thought I'd put that forward as another possible option.

If you're interested, I did a quick writeup about my process of choosing an iPhone engine and why I ended up with cocos2d. If anyone has any further questions regarding cocos2d or iPhone programming, feel free to ask me, I'm usually lurking here these days while waiting for compiles to finish

Ed: Oh, in regards to Bradley's Sprite Manager referenced in the tutorial, cocos2d also has that feature, and I'd concur that it is hugely important for keeping your framerate decent. A quick question for Derek - did you end up having every single sprite on one massive sheet and just Atlasing it, or did you still split it up a bit? (eg. enemy spritesheet, ui spritesheet, etc)

C++/Objective-C at the moment, although did some Flash AS3 stuff last year. I know that some people have answered with the IDEs that they program in - for iPhone programming I use XCode (kind of the only option for iPhone I think) and for PC/Console programming Visual Studio.

Does anyone use other IDEs, like Borland's or Codewarrior, and why? (Just curious as to whether there are better but less well known options out there.)

Greetings fellow indies!

I'm Jason, a gamemaker from Melbourne, Australia. I work as a designer/programmer at a game developer called Wicked Witch Software during the day, while at nights I create independent games. I'm currently working on an indie iPhone game with a couple of friends from university - we're not at a stage were we can release info about it yet, but we're pretty excited about how it's going...

My main interest, and the focus of my personal work is making games that have entertaining stories and interesting, multifaceted characters, in which gameplay and story are deeply intertwined.