Metal Fish Eggs

Right about now a number of notable folks in the world of children’s technology are on their way to the Dust or Magic AppCamp. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make the trip. But I thought I’d use this as an…

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…

Pattern Painter, the perfect preschool puzzler is coming soon to the iTunes App Store! This brand new Tickle Tap App is a pattern, drawing and shape game all in one and features easy-to-follow tracing animations when children need extra help, along…

Why would a three-year-old want to play games on an iPhone? Actually, let’s re-think that—why wouldn’t a three-year-old want to play games on an iPhone?
iPhones and iPod Touch devices are extremely attractive to small users in the three- to…

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…

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…