Dev
Live Butterflies in the App Store!
Jan 21st
“Live Butterflies” is an augmented reality experience developed exclusively for the Apple iPhone4™ and the Apple iPod touch® (4th generation) that includes both a Viewer and Game. Using the video camera and the gyroscope, “Live Butterflies” puts butterflies right into your surroundings. Just tilt the screen to look up and down and rotate to see all of the butterflies flying around you.
In the Viewer, see awesome butterfly species including the Monarch Butterfly, the Blue Morpho Butterfly, the Green Birdwing Butterfly, and the Orange-Barred Sulphur Butterfly. Choose which ones are around you from the menu. Touch the screen near a butterfly and it will land on your finger. The viewer is a great feature for anyone with an interest in butterflies or nature. Press the camera button to take a photo for your Photo Library or send it as an email. Nature sounds play calmly in the background.
In the Game, catch as many butterflies as you can before time runs out. Just touch the screen to catch them. The butterflies are everywhere – above you, at your feet or even behind you, so turn and look all around and tap the screen to catch them. Music plays until time runs out and then high scores are saved to Game Center.
“Live Butterflies” is now available from the App Store, and is exclusively compatible with the Apple iPhone4™ and the Apple iPod touch® (4th generation) because it requires the built-in gyroscope and video camera. Additionally, it requires iOS 3.1.3 or later.
JIRA is great for distributed game development
Aug 25th
I’ve been using JIRA to manage a project and it’s my new favorite tool for distributed team game development. It manages code, tasks, bugs, secure svn, and all of it is integrated pretty seamlessly. It’s got support for Agile planning (aka. SCRUM) which is really handy. It’s also got a Wiki for sharing design docs. It’s presented in a web view accessible over the internet. This definitely beats using Google Docs and DropBox, which I liked for small team projects before trying this. For a micro ISV, it can take care of some of the development related IT stuff. I’m not sure yet how well it scales for larger teams. For more info on JIRA, check out their website here.
Flash full screen mode lacks full keyboard support
May 23rd
Flash is a proven platform for games on a Web page. However when put in Full screen mode, there are a few things that Flash doesn’t do as well. Full screen Flash games can start to run more slowly with increasing resolution, and now I realize that full screen Flash games have only a limited amount of keyboard support.
Full screen mode in Flash Player 10 lacks full keyboard input and apparently it’s a security feature. What? Seriously? Apparently it only allows for limited full-screen keyboard input including these 6 keys – Tab, the Spacebar, and the arrow keys. I wonder how this makes Flash more secure? I mean how how is this lack of full keyboard support in full screen mode a feature and not a bug? Maybe it’s something they are doing as a security measure, but I wonder if the competition (HTML5, Silverlight or Unity) has the same limited approach to keyboard support in Full Screen mode. I’d tend to doubt it, but I’ll update the article when I figure it out.
Full screen mode is fun to have in some Flash games, so Adobe should figure out how to allow full keyboard input in full screen mode.
iPhone OS 4.0 keynote summary
Apr 10th
Here’s a link to the keynote presentation.
Here’s a short summary:
Seven Tentpole Features of iPhone OS 4.0:
1) Multitasking – the ability to run more than one app, have them continue running in the background, and switch between them with tremendous fluidity.
- Background audio (example: control Pandora and stream music while in other apps)
- Voice over IP (Skype) including the ability to receive calls when the phone is locked.
- Background Location – optional periodic GPS tracking.
- Push notifications
- Local notifications
- Task completion after exiting an app, for instance to finish a photo upload.
- Fast app switching that keeps apps from draining battery but makes it possible to switch rapidly between apps.
2) Folders- have up to 2160 apps instead of just 180! And can dock the folders so from the video it looks possible to have 36 apps on the dock.
3) Mail - enhanced Unified Inbox for multiple email accounts and message threads.
4) iBooks on iPhone
5) Enterprise business features like better data protection.
6) Game Center – Social Gaming Network. Invite friends, Matchmaking, Leaderboards, and Achievements.
7) iAds - Mobile advertising that keeps the user in the app but provides an emotional and interactive experience.