Guest post: Sonic like game demo made in Moscrif SDK

Moscrif logoThis simple game was made to demonstrate how to save time when developing a game for several different mobile platforms like iOS, Android or Bada. Because the number of mobile platforms is raising and the developers want to reach the largest possible audience, developing the game several times for every single platform separately is not an option anymore.

sonic game with Moscrif SDK

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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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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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Time distribution. One year later

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

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

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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