Developers log stardate 26082010

It’s been awhile since I last updated this, I’ve have my hands full with Vizati iPhone. Ever since I got an IPod Touch 2G it was easier for Rita to get a sense of the screen size (although we knew to be 320×480) it’s different when you are testing on the real thing, text looks smaller, other stuff looks way too big. Here’s a picture she took after a few adjustments. ...

August 26, 2010 · 4 min · 760 words · David Amador

What are your target platforms for games?

I decided to run a little poll to track what platforms do you target as a game developer. I think this should be interesting. Please share this post link or the direct link to the poll (http://twtpoll.com/dar51l) so that we can have more accurate results. The poll closes in about 6 days and you can select various options of course.

July 26, 2010 · 1 min · 60 words · David Amador

Fixing dark borders sprites on iPhone

I ran into this issue a couple hours ago working on the iPhone sdk: See the darker borders around the image? It’s a png image and that’s was supposed to be a gradient of alpha. So why am I getting this strange stuff around it? Well that’s because that alpha isn’t 0 or 1 or 0 or 255. The first thing I found out is that XCode grabs the png images and multiplies the RGB component with the alpha. So you can understand now why only 0 or 1 works right? Everything in between get’s changed. This is why Apple recommends using PNG over JPGS, although they consume more space they are altered for speed. ...

July 26, 2010 · 2 min · 278 words · David Amador

Developing on Mac and Basalt running on the iPhone

It’s been around two weeks since my last post. Basically because I’ve been busy porting my engine Basalt to iPhone/iPad. If you follow me on twitter you might have known this already since I ranted pretty much at start, moving platform and language is always painful if you are used to other conventions/shortcuts etc. So it all started with my wish to port Vizati to the iPhone, since the game is already running on PC, Xbox360 and Windows Phone 7 one can only wish for an easy and quick port since pretty much all base code is done. ...

July 9, 2010 · 4 min · 688 words · David Amador

Testing iPhone Sdk and MacOSX

So last weekend I finally got my hands on a fully operational Mac OSX with the iPhone SDK so I decided to give it a try. First of all I had to set myself comfortable with this new OS since I’ve always used Windows. It’s not that hard and most of the things are straitgh forward. I booted up X-Code and decided to test an iPhone Application and after 3-4 hours of researching and testing I managed to get a sprite on screen that moves to were I press on screen. Too bad I don’t have an actual Iphone to test it, so I just used the provided iphone simulator. ...

April 29, 2009 · 1 min · 165 words · David Amador