While debugging our new Tickle Tap Toddler Pack iPhone app, I had to fix a couple of obscure bugs caused by the YouTube video on the app’s info screen. After watching the video, none of the sound effects in Sound Shaker work…
Most content made for preschoolers is awful. Harsh? Maybe, but when your little monster wants to read a book, listen to a song, or watch a show on repeat, you have plenty of opportunity to notice. As a parent, finding…
While coding the sound for Arctic Shuffle 2, I ran into a non-obvious memory (to me, anyway) memory leak related to the AVAudioPlayer that took forever to track down.
Here was my original code, which leaks if an error occurs…
For the next version of Arctic Shuffle, we’re using Open GL to speed things up. One problem we’re run into along the way is strange artifacts in textures smaller than 64 pixels by 64 pixels. After a lot of head…
There were some good questions during my presentation last night and via email this morning about units in Box2D.
@jasonkrogh asked what kind of units Box2D uses. Here’s the relevant bit about units from the Box2D manual:
Box2D works with floating point…
For the next version of Arctic Shuffle, we’re using an open source 2D physics engine called Box2D to improve the gameplay. There seems to be a lot of interest in Box2D for the iPhone, but I haven’t found a great overview…
Now that we’re knee deep in iPhone game development, we’re working with a number of different outside developers. Since everyone involved is pretty new to Objective-C, XCode and iPhone development, project organization and coding conventions in our projects have been…
Using Box2D is a great way to add physics to a 2D iPhone game. Since Box2D is written in C++ rather than Objective-C, adding it to your XCode project and getting it to build cleanly can be a bit tricky.…
When developing iPhone games, one of the biggest performance optimizations you can make is to use OpenGL ES for rendering (instead of CoreGraphics or UIKit). For a 2D game like Arctic Shuffle, this means loading all of the animation into…
Here in the office, we use a network drive (called Betsy) to store all of our files. Because I’m too lazy to manually connect to Betsy drive each time I turn on my computer, I use a little AppleScript to…