Exporting Flash Animations to Cocos2d Actions

Exporting Flash animations to cocos2d actions is a topic that has been in my mind since some months ago. Spritesheets based animations are very limited in terms of sprites size and frame rate. The more frames you have, the more memory you consume. And the bigger the sprites, the more memory you need as well.

However, actually, memory usage has not been an issue in the projects I have worked so far. So, exporting Flash animations to cocos2d is a task that I have been procrastinating… till now.

Exporting Flash Animations to Cocos2d Actions

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Gamelab 2012. Bigger and better

Gamelab 2012 was celebrated from June 27 to July 1 in Barcelona, Spain. It is the most important games event in Spain and, since a few years ago, it is considered an international event.

Obviously, I was there 🙂 I was mainly interested on networking but the conferences were also quite interesting. On the other hand, the gamers zone was not very exciting. One year ago I attended to my first Gamelab and wrote a short post about the experience. My opinion from Gamelab 2011 was very negative. The organization was unacceptable, the location was not good enough and there were a lot of poor conferences. The only positive thing about Gamelab 2011 was the networking.

gamelab

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AppCircus Dev Day Barcelona 2012

AppCircus is a unique global travelling showcase of the most creative and innovative apps presented by their creators during some of the most influential international events in mobile/web. AppCircus is open to developers, startups and any other organization and offers each participant a chance to get a nomination to the Mobile Premier Awards.”

On June 21 was celebrated in Barcelona the AppCircus Dev Day. On every AppCircus event all kind of app developers are invited to submit their apps to the contest. I finally decided to submit New Sokoban, despite I was sure that it was impossible to be selected as finalist.

AppCircus Dev Day Barcelona 2012

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Guest post: Miso Strobe Tuner: The Lessons We Learned When Marketing

The Miso Strobe Tuner is one of the first applications that we came out with at Miso Media.  It really is a great app if you are a musician.  The design of the our tuner is great, and it does exactly what it is supposed to do, which is tune an instrument.  When we looked at other companies that had apps directly competing against us, we thought we were the clear leader, which is why we were confused about our lack of sales.  We had a great product, at an insanely low price, and no one was buying it.  Well, we started doing some tests, and our sales and revenue started to climb.  We continue to split test and optimize to this day.  Here are some of the lessons that we have learned:

miso strobe tuner icon

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Talking about the indie life with “Beginning iOS Development”

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

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

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

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

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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