71² – The ramblings of two 30-something developers

So…what’s 71Squared up to?

That’s a good question :o)

Last year proved to be a great year for Particle and Glyph Designer. Both apps have continued to be popular with game developers using either their own engines or frameworks such as Cocos2D, Sparrow, Unity or Corona.

We pushed out some release for both apps to remove bugs that appear and also add some new features and we have come to the point where to really add more we need to move to a 2.0 release.

Moving to 2.0 for both Particle and Glyph Designer gives us the opportunity to go back to the drawing board and make sure the apps are able to do all the cool things we and others want them to do. While they are both performing well at the moment, extending them to include all the cool features that have been requested will push them beyond their original scope and make our lives difficult in trying to both add those features as well as maintain stability.

So with this in mind we have been prototyping for a few months now to see what cool things we can do. This is something we didn’t do much with both Particle and Glyph Designer. Both of these apps really crew from prototypes we created, played with and then developed further. This is part of the reason it’s getting harder to add new features without hacking the app to pieces. This time around we are trying out all the ideas we have as stand alone test apps to see how best to implement the ideas we have.

This inevitably leaves casualties along the way which can be frustrating, but it’s so much nicer to kill a small test app, that have to try and rip out code from the code base that will become the final app.

Some of the items we are working on include the GUI. Tom and I LOVE nice GUI’s and Tom has a particular eye for detail. We have been creating some nice animation categories to use which will make it super easy to add some nice effects into the GUI, helping to keep it uncluttered and easy to use.

We have also been working on a whole new rendering engine for Glyph Designer. I’ve created a prototype render engine which is going to allow us to much more easily get access to ALL the glyphs supported in a font as well as more efficient ways of storing and using the vector paths we use for these glyphs. This again is going to make it much easier to implement features that allow user to gain access to all the glyphs their chosen font has. This new render engine is also going to give us the layer support that has been requested so that you can apply as many strokes, shadows and effects as you like to your glyphs.

For Particle Designer we have been looking at a GUI re-write to keep it inline with Glyph Designer. Also having the iPhone and iPad screens doesn’t really make sense anymore as there are frameworks that use the output of Particle Designer but which are not based on those devices, such as the Starling flash framework.

We are also working on a redesign of the blog as well. We want to merge all the information from the blog, forums and twitter etc into something that is easy to skim and get info from. This gives us a chance to play with some other cool technology such as Node.js. Tom is hard at work on this at the moment prototyping the new look and features it should include. Part of this redesign is to remove the advertising from the site. We have got to a point now where traffic and storage is handled through the sales of the tools, so to keep the site clean and sharp once the current advertising has ended it will be removed.

As you can tell there is a lot going on and still only Tom and I working on this stuff. We see this year as a time when we can consolidate the work we are doing and get everything into a position where it is easier for us to maintain. We have so many ideas and often fall into the trap of working on too many things and finishing none of them. This year we are going to work hard on focusing our efforts more efficiently so that we get things finished and released.

With a large user base for our tools this is of course where a great deal of this focus will be directed. That said we haven’t forgotten about the reason this site was initially created, which was for sharing info through tutorials etc. We are most certainly on a journey which has taken down roads we never even dreamed of, such as the writing a book and having our tools become so popular. This journey has therefore also seen the tutorial side take a hit. I’ve consistently managed to miss EVERY SINGLE date I’ve mentioned about new tutorials for which I must apologise to those who have been keen to see these tutorials get finished. As of now I have to be realistic and while I have so much I want to share through tutorials, I really don’t know when the next tutorial will be done :o(

That said I will still be releasing source code for others to learn from, so I will be releasing the 3D demo that I created for the Voices That Matter conference in November 2011. I put in a ton of comments in the project so it should still prove helpful even though I’ve not managed to get the tutorials done. I’ll also set up a new forum for it so people can ask questions and discuss the project. I hope to get this out within the next week for people to play with.

So, things are busy and exciting and both Tom and I are really looking forward to getting out new versions of our apps as well as all new apps. We would like to thank all those people who have purchased the tools for both their custom and support and we really hope you all like the direction these tools are going to take this year. We would also like to thank all those who have watched the tutorials and read our posts. There is a lot of content on the net and we appreciate your continued interest in what 71Squared is up to.

I’m sure we will get more surprises this year and look forward to sharing the journey with our followers and customers :o)

Many thanks

Mike & Tom

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