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 Open GL as textures, and drawing them onto simple rectangular shapes. There are two caveats [...]
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 do it for me (ip address changed to protect the innocent): tell application "Finder" if [...]
I ran into some strange behavior while programming zombies in ActionScript 3 this morning. The code was pretty straight-forward, setting the zombie sprite’s x and y in an enter frame loop to move it to some arbitrary point. As part of the loop, I was checking if the sprite’s rotation was equal to the angle [...]
Beautiful Code asks well-known (and not so well-known) programmers to discuss the most beautiful piece of code they know. From the preface: For some, it lives in the small details of elegantly crafted software. Others find beauty in the big picture — in how a program’s structure allows it to evolve gracefully over time, or [...]
Optimizing vector artwork in Flash is usually the last thing on an illustrator or animator’s mind when they’re drawing in Flash. Unfortunately, when all the artwork is done and it’s time to get it ready for the web, it can be pretty daunting to think about going through the FLA and doing Modify > Shape [...]
One problem I always run into when developing a game in Flash is how to tell when a timeline animation is finished. The quick and dirty solution is to put some callback functions on a frame (or two or three) on the MovieClip’s timeline. This works well for simple cases, but gets messy quickly. And [...]
Crappy Cat is not a good kitty — unless you consider hard-drinkin’ and hard-livin’ to be desirable qualities in a cat. Then Crappy Cat is a very, very good kitty. The new Crappy Cat game, (which we’ve been programming all summer) went live this past weekend. It’s a bit different than most of our work (definitely not [...]