If you are coding, no matter what it is, games, software, websites, you should be using a code revision control of some sort. Are you using? Cool. Is it Git? Smart choice, so you probably don’t need to read the rest of this post. For the rest I’m giving some help on how to start from scratch. First of all I recommend some reading on Revision Control so that you understand what I’m talking about. ...

First of all I think this is my last idevblogaday post for a while. I my math doesn’t fail me this is my 10th post and it’s time for someone to take turn. Actually it’s just the 9th. I hope my words have somehow enriched your knowledge, in case you want to stick around just bookmark my feeds. I keep this fairly updated. Also since I’ve been working on a new game there’s probably news to share in the next 2-3 months. ...

For sound I use OpenAL, it’s free, cross-platform, I’ve managed to get it working on iPhone, Windows and Mac. Setting up OpenAL to play a sound is pretty straight forward, a bit like OpenGL. First you need to create a context. ALCcontext *context; ALCdevice *device; device = alcOpenDevice(NULL, ALC_DEFAULT_DEVICE_SPECIFIER); if (device == NULL) { // Handle Exception } //Create a context context=alcCreateContext(device,NULL); //Set active context alcMakeContextCurrent(context); // Clear Error Code alGetError(); Now for the second part, loading a wav file. You have to open a file, fill buffers with data and then attach it to a source. ...

So this is what we at Different Pixel, together with 5 other developers have been working on, the “Indie Summer Six Pack” Six indie titles for just $10 – or a stonking $5, if you first share the offer via Facebook. How can you say no to that? The games included are Aztaka, City Rain, Puzzlegeddon, Bob Came In Pieces, Vizati and Lylian.

Holy cow, this is my 100th post. “Insert epic sentence” Depending on how much time you follow my blog or Different Pixel activity you may know that we have an internal Editor called Sapphire Past It was developed over a year ago with the intent of being a “All in one” 2D game editor for our games, built on XNA. It started out pretty well and I’m very happy with the outcome. It served it’s purpose. The problem now is, most of the stuff we need, apart from the generic sprites positioning, rotation etc, are very specific stuff to the game/project in hands. ...

A large percentage of the indie developers have to work on their project at night and/or weekends. In order to pay the bills they have to maintain a day job. There’s no shame in that, many do it, I do it, not everyone can make a mega jump right into fame and fortune with a single project. The rest of us mere mortals have to gradually build a fan base, learn from past mistakes, do better PR, etc. Looking at successes like World of Goo, Braid, Trainyard, it all sounds so easy, everyone quickly makes such huge hype that it seems like they only have to finish the game and they are instantly rich. ...

This has been discussed on thousands of forums and people way smarter than me have given reasons why selling games at $0.99 on the App Store is the future and others why it will hurt gaming and developers. I’m giving my opinion as both a developer and a consumer. As a consumer As a consumer I feel like having thousands of games at that price and/or free makes me not appreciate any of them, there’s way too many and I usually get bothered easily. Now, note that this is a personal problem of mine since most people can still play hours and hours of those games even though they have dozens of them, but I’m pretty sure more feel the same. ...

Render to texture is a very handy functionality. Imagine your game allows for some character customization. You have the body, some different hats, different clothes and other small stuff. Now the easiest way to render this is to just draw it piece by piece every frame. With the proper Z coordinates everything falls in place. But you now have like 4-5 draw calls for one single object. Worse, you might have different textures and swamping textures is expensive. ...

I got this question the other day, how to track individual touches if you are using a couple of fingers for a game? Actually it’s pretty easy if you can access the touch previous position and it’s current position. Let’s start with a small class to store the information class Touch { public: Touch(); ~Touch(); void update_position(float x, float y){ _current_position.x = x; _current_position.x = y; } bool is_same_touch(float x, float y) { if(_current_position.x == x && _current_position.y == y) return true; return false; } protected: CGPoint _current_position; }; Let’s a assume the “move” movement ...

Hum…some stuff happened lately, some I can’t go into detail right now others I can. I was talking with Rita the other days and she had this nice idea for an iPhone game. It’s one of those small concepts that may or not work but I liked the general idea, at least enough to start a small prototype. If everything turns out the way I plan (never is) it should be a 2-3 weeks project. ...