February 2013
1 post
Optimized Fonts Workflow with Unity/Futile,...
I’m currently making a game with Unity / Futile, for the #1GAM of february.
And now I’ve arrived to the point where I need to use FLabel and fonts. Fonts scare me a bit, especially since we have to deal with different screen densities, but this time I’ve found a good worflow to create bitmap fonts for Futile, and I’ll share it here. To understand this article you must...
December 2012
1 post
Hey game reviews, link to our twitter!
When I write an article, I usually try to link to the twitter account or a personal website from a person I’m quoting. This is a kind of thank-you and also, more importantly, a valuable information for the reader, who might want to dig more into the work of this person. Micro Miners was released about a month ago on iOS. It was reviewed on major mobile gaming sites, and so far, I counted 58...
September 2012
2 posts
Notch can change the privacy settings of your...
Yesterday, I uploaded a private video of a game I’ve been working on for the past 2 years (MicroMiners). My goal was to recruit beta testers and to show the video to a few selected reviewers.
I wanted also to show the video to Notch (Do I need to tell Markus Person, aka Notch, is the creator of Minecraft?), who wrote a small (4KB!) game called Miners4K a few years before Minecraft....
June 2012
2 posts
Integrate Cocos2d-x (C++) into an Android...
This is the Android pendant of the Cocos2d-x within UKKit (iOS) tutorial. As you can see, it’s a bit more complex/long with Android as you need to use JNI and configure Eclipse to merge Java and C++ code, whereas Objective C and C++ can be merged with no problem in Xcode for your iOS projects.
Most tutorials about Cocos2d-x and Android will explain you how to compile and run a pure...
Integrate Cocos2d-x into an UIKit application
Cocos2d-x is a multi-platform open source (MIT) C++ / OpenGL. With one source code, you can generate binaries for iPhone, Android, and more. That’s a big time saver.
Cocos2d-x is younger than its famous brother Cocos2d and despite being actively developed and quite stable already, it lacks of tutorials.
As I’ve struggled a bit to integrate Cocos2d-x into a UIKit application...
April 2012
1 post
January 2012
2 posts
Recipe : "Automatic email processing with Python...
Difficulty 2/5 Duration 1 hour Knowledge
A bit of server administration and a bit of development. No need to be an expert. What Is It
This is how I build a SMTP server with Python that can process automatically incoming emails. Remarks
- The other usual way of processing emails, is to download periodically (every 10 minutes for example) your emails from an IMAP/POP server. You’ll get the...
New Cocos2d-iPhone extensions, a progress bar, and...
As requested in the comments of Scale9Grid for Cocos2d, I’ve uploaded my code to GitHub.
While doing this, I also added 2 extensions to Cocos2D for iPhone : CCProgressBar
CCProgressBar uses 2 CCSpriteScale9, no OpenGL coding. You can set the size of the bar, the size of the inner bar, you can set it in “waiting mode”, and of course you can set the progress. See the video...
August 2011
1 post
12 tags
Scale9Grid for Cocos2D
I’ve spent the latest 10 days working on a iOS/Cocos2D popups engine for my games. As Paul Legato wrote on his blog, ❝custom dialog boxes are a must for any game❞, displaying system popups in a game can interrupt the gameplay experience.
I wanted a popup that can adapt its size to every kind of content. That’s where you need a Scale9Grid component. Scale9Grid was popularized by Flash...
July 2011
1 post
Cow Giveaway
For the latest update of Mozzle I made a cow. The drawing was done in Flash IDE, exported as a bitmap and packed with TexturePacker (great tool highly recommended for all game developers).
I give away the textures in high and standard definition, with corresponding Cocos2D class (for iOS). You can do whatever you want with it. I guess it’s called MIT license.
How you use it?
CCCow...
June 2011
3 posts
7 tags
4050 hand made levels!
Blockoban just got updated with 1800 new levels for a grand total of 4050 hand made levels! Which I believe allows me to call it “the game with the most hand made levels on the appstore”. Achievement unlocked.
Let’s take a step back… How the hell is it possible to design 4050 unique levels?
Let’s assume making a level takes 15 minutes on average. 4050 levels means...
Tiny Wings Hills with Cocos2D
Not only Tiny Wings is a fun and popular game, but it has also blown our developers mind with its gorgeous hills made of procedural graphics.
I’ve spent a few days trying to make something similar with Cocos2D. I’ll share in this article a piece of code that is responsible for drawing the hills. A bit of OpenGL ES knowledge is necessary to understand it. If you want to see the code...
May 2011
2 posts
Space Dragons, submitted!
That went fast. 5 days after starting the project, it’s already submitted to the app store.
To be fair, it relies a LOT on code developed for my previous game Mozzle.
The game will be free, and actually, despite it’s submitted to the app store, I consider it as a work in progress. A kind of public beta.
Noel Llopis, the co-author of the fantastic iPad game “Casey’s...
Space Dragons
Just like the Moonlights project was started to understand how works the engine of World of Goo, Space Dragons was started to understand how this damn talented Andreas Illiger made Tiny Wings.
Once again the same story, the engine I’ve done for Space Dragons is quite good and I want to make a game of it (a mini game actually). A clone? I hope not, despite it’s very close to Tiny...
April 2011
4 posts
App Store Jurassic Search Engine
I’m not a SEO specialist. I will sum up here all that I’ve learned about the prehistoric app store search engine.
1) The search engine don’t take into account the app’s description (it was once, but Apple was not able to cope with the spam inside the descriptions, and decided to stop processing it).
2) The search engine takes into account the title.
3) The search engine...
Popular Meow vs Tiny Wings
Recently I’ve been obsessed with this popular video of 2 talented young boys singing “Meow” by Rossini. This song is pure genius and it is particularly well executed here. See below.
Then, wanting to know more about this song, I decided to have a look at other versions on youtube. I found a lot of videos. But despite it was the same song, none was providing the same happy...
iPhone beta tests with promocodes
Testflightapp.com was launched a few months ago and has made it much easier for iOS developers to manage beta tests, and most important, for testers to install beta (AdHoc) builds. (It has some limitations though, like unsupported iOS3.x).
But there is another way that makes life even easier for testers: promocodes. It’s not very well known, but when your app is approved with a release...
Your Flixel game on iPad, not yet there
AIR SDK 2.6 was released a few days ago, with iOS packager included. It means you can now compile your Flixel (Flex) game with the AIR compiler and package it for your iPhone or iPad.
Porting my Flixel game Icual to the iPad was a matter of 1 hour (!). It works and it’s playable. But unfortunately the performances are not yet there. There was a post+video recently about nice performances...
March 2011
1 post
Get your Flixel game on Blackberry Playbook
So, you have a game made with Flixel ? And you wander if it could run on upcoming Blackberry Playbook ? Maybe you want to win the free Playbook too ?
Flixel ? Flex ?
If you know already Flixel and Flex, you can skip this paragraph and jump to the next one.
For those who don’t know about Flixel yet, it’s a popular lightweight game framework based on...
January 2011
4 posts
The solitude of the iOS game developer
The catastrophic launch of Slap No Slap has inspired me this sketch, quickly done with Photoshop and an old Wacom tablet.
@SlapNoSlap is not a bad game. Actually I like to play it more than my previous games. It has all you could wish from an iPhone game, it’s Retina display enabled, Universal for iPhone and iPad, and Game Center enabled. I’ve spent about 7 full weeks on it.
...
10 tags
Using Twitter as a Backend(!)
Do you need a simple news feed for your application? You could probably rent a piece of server and code something in PHP, Ruby or Python, you could for example use google app engine as your backend.
But did you think about using Twitter?
3 limitations you have to know before choosing Twitter as your backend :
Each article will be 144 characters max, but do you really think your customers...
6 tags
BonusLevel, make your levels, AND your games!
Making a level on BonusLevel.org, is the rule, but making a game doesn’t happen so often.
Today, a game started more than 1 year ago by 2 young members of BonusLevel.org, has made it to the front page. The game is a mouse avoider, called “Path 4 Mouse”, with endless options in the level editor. If you are not familiar with game development, maybe you don’t know how...
10 tags
Vimeo is cool (Youtube is not)!
The BitmapData.draw method in Flash, is protected. If you try to write a MovieClip from another domain/website into a BitmapData, you will get a SecurityError. Unless this domain authorizes other domains with a crossdomain.xml policy.
I learned this when trying to write a Youtube video on a BitmapData.
Youtube is not cool, but fortunately, Vimeo is! Yes, Vimeo authorizes all of us to write...
