Tools

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… ...

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. ...

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. ...

A 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. ...

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

Up until a few weeks ago, I never had any problems with iPhone game resources. I just added whatever I needed to the XCode project, and it was ready to load from within the game. That simple. But that was because of the kind of games I was making, which were very light on content, with mostly procedurally generated assets (the consequence of working by myself and being much better at programming than at Photoshop). ...

Ever since I turned indie, version control just hasn’t been much of an issue. Gone are the days of hundreds of multi-GB files that changed multiple times per day. With small teams of one or two plus a few collaborators, Subversion hosted remotely worked fine. Of course, all the cool kids these days are going on about how their distributed version control systems solve world hunger, but I’ve been mostly ignoring it because I have better things to do with my time (like writing games [1]). ...

I’ve been making computer games in some form or another for just over 25 years now. At the very beginning, as a hobby (passion) and completely by myself (although not for lack of trying to get some of my friends involved). In the late 90s, when I finally left academia and started making games professionally, teams were still relatively small, with a total of around 10-15 people per team. As we all know, budgets and scopes kept growing, and so did team sizes. At its peak, the largest team I worked at had around 200 people. That’s when I decided to go indie and started Power of Two Games, which was obviously just two of us. Finally, now as Snappy Touch, I’ve gone full circle: It’s just me again. ...

I’ve long been a fan of minimal game runtimes. Anything that can be done offline or in a separate tool, should be out of the runtime. That leaves the game architecture and code very lean and simple. One of the things you potentially give up by keeping the game runtime to a minimum is an editor built in the game itself. But that’s one of those things that sounds a lot better than it really is. From a technical point of view, having an editor in the game usually complicates the code a huge amount. All of a sudden you need to deal with objects being created and destroyed randomly (instead of through clearly defined events in the game), and you have to deal with all sorts of crazy inputs and configurations. ...

I just had a chance to check out iSimulate, a tool for iPhone developers created by Vimov. iSimulate is intended to complement the current iPhone simulator by adding most of the features a real iPhone has. In the spirit of full disclosure, Vimov sent me a promo code to try it out for free, but I only accepted it with the condition I could write my unfiltered impressions. So here we go. ...

Have you ever given some thought to why you decided to become a game programmer? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t to do mundane, repetitive tasks. Yet sometimes we find ourselves spending a significant portion of our time making sure that the code compiles for all platforms, or that there are no potential bugs lurking in the depths of the game, or even building the assets for each level and running them to make sure they load correctly. Clearly, those are all things that need to be done, but if they are so repetitive and mindless, couldn’t we put some of the computers around us to good use and have them do the job for us? A build server will do all that and more, much faster and more reliably than we could, and it will free us to work on the thing that made us fall in love with this industry in the first place: the game. ...

We have been talking a lot about Scons recently at the Power of Two Games World Headquarters. MSBuild has proven to be quite a pain to work with for our asset builds and eventually left us dissatisfied (that’s material for a whole other entry). So we kept looking over to Scons as a possible solution. ...

LeChimp has been rocking my world lately. I’ve been checking in code that passes all the unit tests, confident that everything was fine, just to find out the functional test fails loudly and obnoxiously [1]. The other day it even managed to put the game in an infinite loop (yes, my fault). It might sound annoying, but I love it how LeChimp keeps us honest and makes subtle problems immediately obvious. A couple of months ago something unusual happened: The functional test failed but I wasn’t able to reproduce the problem right away. The failure was not a crash, but an object in the world ending up in a different state than expected. That’s always tougher to track down. To make things even more fun, was object was affected changed depending on whether the game was run from the command line or the debugger. Oh, and did I mention it only happened in release mode? I’ve got a baaad feeling about this! ...

Yes, we’re a starving startup. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s actually quite good: we don’t have any venture capital investment, and we’re running purely from savings out of our own pockets. On the flip side, we have full control over our company, and we can decide what do do and how to run it. Of course, we’re far from loaded with money, so keeping expenses to a minimum is definitely a top priority. It’s not coincidence that one of our most popular lunches is sharing a gigantic $5 sub at Manhattan Giant Pizza or the $3.50 Kealani’s chicken teriyaki sandwich (fortunately, they’re actually delicious too!). Whenever it makes sense, we’ve opted for the most inexpensive options[1]: plastic workbenches from Costco for our desks, lights from Ikea with unpronounceable names, an outdated P3 that became our file server given to us by a friend, or a free scanner/printer donated by my girlfriend. So when it came time to set up our office tools, we also looked for the most inexpensive solution that met all our needs. ...

We grabbed the best features of each framework and created what we think it’s the best C++ unit-testing framework out there (for our needs anyway). We took the results and put them up in Sourceforge under a veryunrestrictive license, and that’s how UnitTest++ was born. ...