Talking about the indie life with “Beginning iOS Development”

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Today I would like to redirect you to Beginning iOS Development. Some days ago I was asked by them to answer some questions about iOS development and the indie life in general. We talked about a bunch of topics such as the troubles an indie developer may encounter while trying to make a living of app development, the first app I created (paintingWalls), how to succeed as an indie dev, how to market your apps with no budget, etc.

To be honest, I think that the questions were extremely appropriate and the overall interview was very well crafted. It made me think deeply about the whole indie stuff. There were some things that I was not taking into account, specially from the strategic point of view. And I was not even aware of that. Trying to answer sincerely the questions of the interview made me realize about it.

I really think that was me who gained more from that conversation 🙂 Here you have the complete interview. Not too long 😉

The Interview

Making a cross-platform game in two weeks

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In today’s post I would like to share with you my experience working on my first cross-platform game. Although it is intended to be available for Windows Phone, iOS and Android, currently I’m focused on the Windows Phone version.

The game is called Muster my Monsters (MmM). It is a two-player fighting monsters action game. It is a casual game, so game mechanics need to be simple and art appealing to most of people. Here you have a gameplay video.

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App prototyping with Keynote

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Prototyping is a critical developing phase. During prototyping you may find design problems on your app that, if not detected early, would probably make you and your team waste an important amount of time.

There are a lot of techniques and tools to create prototypes. You can prototype on paper while brainstorming and use sophisticated tools later to create visually appealing prototypes.

However, I decided to use Keynote for prototyping my last client app Aduho Mirror. In today’s post I would like to share my reasons and experience.

App prototyping with Keynote

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FacebookScorer – Post highscores to user’s Facebook Wall

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Today’s post is an update for an old article about posting high scores to Facebook Wall. Some users have reported some issues about this class. There were some problems with the state control when authorization was needed.

Today I will like to post a new version of the class that solves these issues. The project is now called FacebookScorer and you can find it on GitHub.

Facebook icon_big

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The mobile cross-platform development headache

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The lasts weeks I have been trying and playing with different frameworks, methodologies and alternatives to mobile cross-platform development. In today’s post I would like to share with you my conclusions and… headaches.

So, you know, by definition cross-platform development is never an easy issue. Every platform is very different from each other just because it needs to differentiate from the competitors. So you, as a cross-platform developer, have to deal with it. Period.

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Time distribution. One year later

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About one year ago I wrote an article entitled “Time distribution on game development“. On this article you can read about what tasks I was working on when developing New Sokoban and how they were distributed on time. That post was written a few days before the approval of the game.

A year has gone since then and a lot of things have happened and changed. In today’s post I would like to present a new chart revealing important differences on time distribution on my everyday work. After that, I will try to get some useful conclusions.

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Guest post: The Making of Pigeons Attack with Cell SDK

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Pigeons Attack was born as a sample to show how the accelerometer API works. You move forward and backward –tilting your phone- your just washed car in order to avoid pigeons get it dirty. Once the semaphore becomes green, leave quickly the scene to check how many impacts you had. The less you have the better.

Within the following sections you will be guided through the development process, starting from a new Cell SDK project.

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In-App web browser control for iOS apps

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In today’s post I would like to share with you a little piece of code. If you need to integrate in-app web browser control into your iPhone apps, this handy module will save you some time.

There are already some solutions to this problem out there but non of them offers the features I needed. First, the solution I present in this article uses a work-around for the well-known UIWebView bug that causes erratic behavior when combining “zooming operations” and “landscape orientation”. Moreover, the solution presented is highly customizable.

I have called it TSMiniWebBrowser. You can download the source code at the end of the article.

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Game Theory Applied: the puzzle of designing a puzzle game

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Today’s post is going to be the fourth in the series “Game Theory Applied”. You have the previous ones here:

Today I would like to talk about the tricky concepts around puzzles and puzzle-based games like New Sokoban. Puzzles are often considered to not be games at all. This means that designing a video-game entirely based on puzzles implies some issues that need to be addressed to minimize the inherent problems that puzzles have and maximize their benefits. We will see it applied to New Sokoban, a puzzle-solving game.

Game Theory Applied: puzzle games

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