Games from Within

The last entry about in-app purchases left off with the products correctly displayed on the store and ready for purchase. Let’s push that buy button! Purchasing a product The store is fully populated, the items are displayed and, if all goes well, the user presses the buy button. What now? At this point I check that in-app purchases [...]

Ever since Apple announced OS 3.0 with in-app purchases, I knew I had implement it in Flower Garden. The concept of in-app purchases fits very well with the idea of a flower shop where virtual gardeners can purchase extra items for their gardens. It was just a matter of justifying the time necessary to implement [...]

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, [...]

Here are the slides and the source code for my talk this afternoon at 360iDev in Denver. Thanks to everyone who came to the talk. I was surprised to see so much interest on this topic, so that was great. Session description: The iPhone has a very powerful engine under that shiny hood when it comes [...]

A bit over a month ago [1], I decided it was time to create a “lite” version of Flower Garden [2]. I really thought it was going to be a pretty easy task: Disable a few pots, remove some seeds, and repackage it. Sounds simple enough. But before that, I had to decide how to [...]