Using SQLite to Organize Design Data

I haven’t written purely about tech in a long time, but this is a particularly interesting intersection of tech and game design, so I thought I would share it with everybody. Be warned though: This is one of those posts that’s just about the thought process I went through for something and the solution I reached. I’m most definitely not advocating this solution for everybody. Think about it and pick the solution that works for you the best.

By now you’ve probably heard of Lasting Legacy: you’re managing a family around the 19th century through several generations, socializing, choosing good marrying prospects, and helping family members pick an occupation. Ah, occupations…

Tutor

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Quick Tip: Working With Shaders On iOS

I’m taking a couple of days to upgrade some of my libraries for doing prototyping both in 2D and 3D. One of the many overdue things I wanted to do, was to finally ditch OpenGL ES 1.1 and move to 2.0 exclusively. Yes, even if you’re only doing a 2D game, OpenGL ES 2.0 is way worth it.

There were even a couple of cases during Casey’s Contraptions that we wanted a particular effect, and couldn’t get it quite right, but it would have been trivial to whip up a shader if we had been using OpenGL ES 2.0. In the end, we had to resort to texture combiners (yuck), and it wasn’t exactly what we had in mind. Continue reading

Xcode 4 Trials and Tribulations

Wether you want it or not, Xcode 4 is around to stay when it comes to iOS development. I’ve been happily comfortable with Xcode 3 for quite a while, and my first impressions of Xcode 4 left me completely cold. However, support for Xcode 3 will soon go away, so I need to get ready for the inevitable transition. Maybe I was just having a bad day when I looked at Xcode 4 for the first day. Or maybe my nightmares finally came true and I’ll be forced to look for an alternative IDE. Which one is it? Read on to find out. Continue reading

Quick Notes On Lion

Mac OS X LionA couple of days ago I had the misfortune of getting back home to find my 6 month-old MacBook Pro completely dead (my second Apple laptop casualty in three years–not a great track record). Long story short, the Apple Store wasn’t able to help me in any way other than ship out the laptop for repairs. Since without it I’m dead on the water, I bought a 17″ MacBook Pro on the spot. They didn’t have one with SSD hard drive, so this is most likely going back to the store when I get back my repaired laptop. In the meanwhile, I can continue working and it lets me check out first hand Lion and Xcode 4.

These are mostly quick notes to myself so I remember what to change when I upgrade my main machine, but I thought other developers hesitant to upgrade to Lion might find it useful as well. Continue reading

URL Shorteners In Under Two Minutes

This morning I added the goo.gl URL shortener to Flower Garden, so I thought a quick post with sample code might be helpful for other developers looking to do something similar.

I use the URL shortener in Flower Garden to send bouquets through SMS. Space is limited in a text message, so the message just contains some text explaining what is it and the URL pointing to the bouquet image. (Yes, I would much rather send them through MMS, but Apple isn’t exposing that yet to developers).

Sms

In this case, the full URL is http://flowers.snappytouch.com/sms.php?id=949618b4b3c6f3d76e32b45446e238a0 which gets thankfully shortened to http://goo.gl/IV5cq. Continue reading