The last few weeks have been spent putting the finishing touches to RocketFuse ready for submission to Apple for review. We finished on Monday night and are now waiting very impatiently for Apple to finish the review process so that we can unleash our combination of physics, rockets, fuses and caves onto iPhones and iPods worldwide. After all, those rockets won't escape from those caves on their own! The final stage of the game development process is my favourite and simultaneously most dreaded stage. Want to know why?

We are days away from submitting our first iPhone game, RocketFuse, to Apple.

Blasting off and out of a level.

Steam's weekend deal was 75% off a bundle of 10 indie games on Steam. I only noticed this last night, and with the variety of games in there I hastily reached for the credit card.

I won't grill the entire pack but I wanted to make an observation about World of Goo. I know I'm a bit late on the uptake of this game, but it deserves the praise it's received. I've only tried out about 6 of the 10 games thus far (and everyone probably already knows I love Braid), but out of the others I've lunged into World of Goo is the most immersive.

The indie games scene is, in many ways, like the indie music scene. We're big fans of other indie developers, like Gaijin Games, 2D Boy, The Behemoth and Polytron Corporation, and one of the aspirations of RocketHands is to be mentioned in the same sentence as all of them. Oh look, we have been!

Our very own Messrs. Kranzky and Beetlefeet (aka Jason Hutchens and Jack Casey), are both much quoted in "The Big Crunch", an article on GameJam events, published in this month's PC PowerPlay. Get it from your newsagent!

So, try following up from a post about controlling giant robots with Wii remotes.  I am man enough to say: it's not easy.  But I will try my best!

Things are getting exciting here at the RocketHQ.  As well as getting our business structure operating, I've been working on the marketing plan for our first release.  It's been a pretty interesting experience as I've had to improvise on a number of things, what with having a marketing budget equal to my personal skiing budget (read: nil).

Tomorrow night at the Velvet Lounge from 7:30pm onwards is the What's That In Your Pocket!?! event, organised by Let's Make Games. Anyone interested in mobile games - either developing them or playing them (or both!) would do well to come down and check it out. For starters, there will be plenty of locally developed iPhone games on display, including our first commercial product: RocketFuse!

There also will be furious DS and PSP action, and a prerelease showing of Dissidia: Final Fantasy. See you there, tomorrow evening!

RocketFuse has undergone rigorous polishing since Beetlefeet posted about art direction, both in code and art, but being an artist I'm here to talk about the art. And by talk about art I mean post pictures. For instance, here is the game logo:

Ooohs and ahhhs.

Now look over there! A screenshot of the game, courtesy of Dodgey, with almost perfectly symmetrical rocket application:

Besides making games, I (along with Simon Wittber and Adrian Boeing) have also recently been working at Transmin on the control system for a pair of trash grapple robots to be commisoned into a recycling plant in the UK. The robots weigh 15 tonne each and have a reach of about 17m. Both robots are situated inside a factory within reach of each other, where they will be used to process household waste.