Games from Within

Anybody who worked with me or saw any of my code, would know right away why they call me the Const Nazi. That’s because in my coding style, I make use of the keyword const everywhere. But instead of going on about how const is so great, I’m going to let Hitler tell us how [...]

This is my first entry into #iDevBlogADay. It all started very innocently with a suggestion from Miguel, but the ball got rolling pretty quickly. The idea is to have one independent iPhone game developer write a blog entry each day of the week. At first we thought we would be hard-pressed to get 7 developers, [...]

A few days ago, Tony Albrecht posted the slides of his presentation titled “Pitfalls of Object-Oriented Design” [1]. Even though the title is really broad and could easily be misinterpreted, it’s not just a general bash on OOD. Instead, it’s very much focused on how object-oriented design is not a good match for high-performance apps [...]

Picture this: Toward the end of the development cycle, your game crawls, but you don’t see any obvious hotspots in the profiler. The culprit? Random memory access patterns and constant cache misses. In an attempt to improve performance, you try to parallelize parts of the code, but it takes heroic efforts, and, in the end, [...]

I've gotten a lot of questions about how big our codebase is, how fast does it build, how many tests we have... Fear not, Gentle Reader, all your pressing questions will be answered here.