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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

Small side-note first, Vizati is now available for the Super Nintendo, more info. For my third idevblogaday post I’m going to talk about Game Center. Game Center was released only a couple months ago (September or so) but already tons of applications are using it and even more, players ask for it. It’s a way to track achievements, leader boards etc. Unfortunately It’s only available from iOS 4.1+, so some compatibility check has to be done....

This week I’ve been working on replacing my current scripting system. It worked great for Vizati but I need something with a little more flexibility. Instead of explaining what I’ve managed to get working I’ve made a screenshot with some notes. I think I’m going to make this my #ScreenshotSaturday

Spent a little time giving my blog a new look. It’s not that I didn’t like the old one but sometimes it was a bit of a mess, I’ve been getting many new readers so it was time for a cleaner look. My main concern was getting all code posts to be readable but I think they are class XPTO { public: XPTO(); }; Let me know if you find any errors, since I’m not going to dig up the whole blog finding errors =P...

So you can’t make a game without images, right? Well, actually you can but that’s another story. But how can you load a jpg or a png and use then on OpenGLES? First let’s make a simple class Texture2D class Texture2D { public: Texture2D(int id, int width, int height) { _textureId = id; _width = width; _height = height; } virtual ~Texture2D(void) { // Delete Texture from HGL Memory glDeleteTextures(1, ((GLuint*)&_textureId)); } int getTextureId() {return _textureId; } protected: int _textureId; // The reference ID of the texture in OpenGL memory int _width; int _height; }; Now for the code to actually load the image...

I follow a couple of dev blogs, some are game developers, others make websites or software. In the last couple of months I’ve been reading a lot of them complaining about lack of motivation to develop their idea of the lack of motivation for development in general. Happens to me too, heck it happens to everyone once in a while… It’s something that happens usually half way though or after you get the initial prototype running....