71² – The ramblings of two 30-something developers

Saving Game State

Just a FYI that I’ve just started to put together a tutorial on saving game state. I had a request for a tutorial on this recently and its something I had to do in Sir Lamorak’s Quest.

It actually sounds harder than it is. I ended up using NSCoding in the objects that I wanted to store and it ended up being REALLY simple to implement. This tutorial will be based on a stand alone app rather than on the previous tutorial code. That way I can just focus on how you can save state using NSCoding. I’ll then give you a sneak peak at how that looks in Sir Lamorak’s Quest.

Can’t give a firm time for the tutorial, but it should not be long :oD

Mike

iPhone Game Programming – Tutorial 11 – Joypad

At last, I’ve finally recorded the joypad tutorial. This is a short tutorial of 20 minutes that covers how to implement a joypad control into the code that has been used through the other tutorials.

Tutorial 11

Tutorial 11 Project

Update 19/12/09:

After a request I’ve created a very simple view based app that does the same as the OpenGL version in the tutorial video. They key difference is that this app does nothing but move the ship around the screen to demo the joypad code without the need for any of the other code from the tutorials. Hope it helps

JoypadExample Project

Mike

Happy Christmas

It’s been a long time coming, but I’m actually encoding the Joypad tutorial as I type. Once it’s encoded I’ll be loading it straight onto the blog tonight.

Seeing as it was Christmas and I wanted to say thanks to everyone who has been supporting 71Squared over the last year I forced some time into the diary and got it done.

I hope you enjoy it once its up and that it ends up being useful in your projects.

Merry Christmas

Mike

Vertex Buffer Objects

A while back I posted on how I had been trying to use Vertex Buffer Objects with the tile map in Sir Lamorak’s Quest. Until recently everything was going really well and then I hit a snag.

Performance on the real device had been great but then all of a sudden dropped to 6fps. I spent ages trying to work out what I had changed and then realised that I had just populated the entire tile map with images. All tiles now had a image. On running some checks in instruments it was obvious that I was now maxing out the tile renderer :(

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Sprite Sheet Builder Tool

I have recently found a great tool for creating sprite sheets. I have been using a Java tool called Packer created by Kev Glass who wrote the Java game API called Slick.

The new app I have found is called Zwopple and is currently a web based Flash application, although I think plans are in place to create a downloaded AIR based version. It generates both the PNG file for the sprite sheet image along with a control file that is actually a plist file. That makes it SOOO easy on the iPhone to process :o)

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On MacDev Podcast

Whilst I was at the Voices That Matter iPhone Development conference I was interviewed for the InformIT On MacDev podcast series talking about beginning iPhone game development.

There are also podcasts of others who were talking at the conference such as Aaron Hillegass, Kevin Avila who did a talk on OpenAL and Erik Buck who is a co-author of Cocoa Design Patterns.

These guys really know their subject and are an interesting watch.

Podcast »

Mike

Sir Lamorak’s Quest Sneak Peak

Hi all

I’ve managed to put together a short movie of Sir Lamorak’s Quest. I wanted to give you all a preview of how the game is coming along and how its looking. I’m really pleased with how its coming along and I cant wait to get the book and the game finished and out in the wild.

If you have any comments please leave them as I’d love to hear what you think. Its not complete and still a lot to do, but I was eager to give you a sneak peak.

Sir Lamorak’s Quest Demo

Enjoy

Mike

Degenerate Triangles

I’ve been working on optimising some areas of Sir Lamorak’s Quest. Most recently this has been reviewing the Tiled class. I was until this week only rendering the tiles of the map that were visible on the screen thereby trying to reduce the amount of work the GPU was being asked to do.

During the iPhone conference I had a great conversation with Eric Buck after his talk “OpenGL ES in iPhone Games”. It turns out that I’m trying to compensate for something that the GPU can actually handle all on its own. Eric described the GPU in the iPhone as a “number crunching monster” that can actually process data over 100x faster than the CPU for certain tasks.

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VTM iPhone Conference has finished

Hi all

I wanted to thank all those people who made time to give me great feedback on my presentation today as well as those who told me they had been using the tutorials on the blog. It always amazes me how these things spread so quickly and I was nicely surprised at how many people at the conference knew of this blog and had been using its resources.

It was great to hear and I will work hard to keep posting new and interesting information and tutorials.

I had a great time at the conference and enjoyed all the sessions I attended and thanks to all those who attended mine “Beginning iPhone Game Development”. It was cool meeting with and chatting with Aaron Hillegass and Eric Buck. Eric did a fantastic OpenGL ES session and he gave me some great ideas during a chat we had afterwards. Once I have had a chance to try out the ideas I’ll post about them of course :o)

It was great to see so many people enthusiastic and wanting to learn how to develop games on the iPhone.

Here’s looking forward to the conference next year :o)

Mike

Deadmau5 Ghosts

Navigate your mouse around the mazes collecting cheeses to get rid of the ghosts. Aim for a high-score, get on the leaderboard and stay up-to-date with push notifications. Complete the game and download a free exclusive Deadmau5 track!

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