Skip Navigation

Ramblings from the team at zinc Roe

Metal Fish Eggs

Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category

Preview Color Collector!

Color Collector, the playful preschool color quest, is coming soon to the iTunes App Store! This inventive app uses iPhone camera, and it makes it exciting for children to discover colors wherever they are. See Color Collector in action!

Read the full postLeave a Comment

Taking a look at Adobe Stratus

I had some time to take a look at what Adobe Labs has been up to and got caught up on Stratus. Stratus is a (currently free) service Adobe provides that enables peer 2 peer communication between multiple instances of the flash player. It uses RTMFP which you can learn more about on Adobe Labs. [...]

Read the full post1 Comment

Tickle Tap Spotlight: Sound Shaker, Count Caddy and Sort Slider

Hurrah! The first three apps in our Tickle Tap App series are now available for download on the iTunes App Store. Sound Shaker is a sound-making designed for preschoolers, but so far it’s a hit among children of all ages. (You know something is entertaining when it brings a smile to the faces of serious-minded journalists, jaded [...]

Read the full postLeave a Comment

Supporting the New Media Plankton

With news of the Ontario government using the lure of $250+ million in incentives to bring UbiSoft to Toronto there is talk in the air about government support for the gaming industry. Ryan at Untold summarizes things well in this blog post. The government is failing to support the folks who need it most – [...]

Read the full post1 Comment

Walkthrough Videos

Finally got around to posting some walkthroughs of our Zimmer Twins iPhone games: Flying Furball, Stunt Wagon, Snack Attack. You’ll find links to all three games on the App Store on our iPhone App page.

Read the full postLeave a Comment

Arctic Shuffle 2 Beta Test

The follow-up to Arctic Shuffle is nearing completion. We have rebuilt Arctic Shuffle to take advantage of Box2d, openGL and in-app purchases. The result is a game that is faster, smoother and more extensible. We’ve also managed to add in a few new obstacles and we have plans for more. We’re currently looking for external [...]

Read the full postLeave a Comment

Artifacts in small textures on the iPhone

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 scratching, an obscure forum post saved the day. It turns out there’s a bug in [...]

Read the full post1 Comment

Units in Box2D

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 numbers, so some tolerances have to be used to make Box2D perform well. [...]

Read the full postLeave a Comment

iPhone and Box2D

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 anywhere, so I’ve put together a presentation for tonight’s Toronto iPhone Developer Meetup. Here [...]

Read the full post11 Comments

Project Organization and Coding Conventions for iPhone Games

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 all over the map. To improve the quality of our projects and make them easier [...]

Read the full post2 Comments