Month: August 2012

Original Author: Charilaos Kalogirou Continuing after my The basics If you are like me you will probably think that the Playbook has something to do with the tech that used to run Blackberry’s phones. This misconception was so strong in me that I didn’t even consider a port to it. The truth is however, that … Continue reading “Porting your iOS game to Blackberry Playbook (and future BB10 phones)”

Original Author: Kyle-Kulyk …almost…there… I swear I can see the finish line up ahead.  If you squint, you can just make it out.  It’s there, I assure you.  As we approach the launch of our second mobile title, Vex Blocks, I can’t help but get excited at the prospect of putting our finished product in … Continue reading “The Home Stretch”

Original Author: Tyler York Last week, we wrote a well-received post on how to maximize your launch for iOS or Android, but it also prompted a lot of questions: What if your goal wasn’t a huge launch, but to test the concept? What if you’re trying to capture a hardcore niche? What do I do if … Continue reading “How to get your first 1000 players”

Original Author: Luke Dicken Warren Spector recently gave an interview to Eurogamer that’s circulating pretty widely now about the need for better AI in games. Specifically what he’d like to see is people like John Carmack and Tim Sweeney stop focusing on graphics and start working on creating believable characters and immersive worlds. Of course, … Continue reading “The Spector of Game AI”

Original Author: Alex Norton This little rant was mostly to have something to point people towards who don’t appreciate what it takes to make a game. For the people who are happy to whinge about the way a box falls off a shelf rather than just smile and enjoy the game. Making games is hard. … Continue reading “The Trials of the Game Developer”

Original Author: Tyler York Launch is one of the most important moments in your game’s life. A good launch can lead to a strong initial audience that you can leverage for ranks and, in the best case scenario, organic traffic from reaching a Top 25 list. A bad launch leaves you with only the grim … Continue reading “Maximizing your launch on iOS and Android”

Original Author: Colt McAnlis If you have an inline profiling system, with some slight modifications, you can view that data in the Chrome web browser rather than writing a visualization tool yourself. Having a nice graphical representation of profiling data is crucial to finding critical hotspots in a realtime application. Creating a viewer application for … Continue reading “Using Chrome://tracing to view your inline profiling data”

Original Author: Simon-Unger Andy Samberg, hair performance capture session.   The competition for jobs in the gaming industry is getting increasingly fierce (many companies receiving 100′s of applicants for a single position), yet many applicants consistently make the same mistakes which hurt their chances of landing the gig. I’m going to cover some of the … Continue reading “How to get a job as an animator in games…”

Original Author: Niklas Frykholm Guess what! You’ve just inherited a stinking, steaming pile of messy old code. Congratulations! It’s all yours. Bad code can code can come from all kinds of places. Middleware, the internet, perhaps even your own company. You know that nice guy in the corner that nobody had time to check up … Continue reading “Cleaning bad code”

Original Author: Betable Blog Making money on Android can be hard. Many developers devote countless hours to building, testing, and marketing their apps only to fall short of that income-independent holy grail. We went through over 50 Android game & app postmortems and developer income reports to put together a list of common best practices … Continue reading “Making money with Android apps”