Learning iPhone Game Programming – available on Safari Rough Cuts
I’m really pleased to announce that my book “Learning iPhone Game Programming: A Hands-On Guide To Building Your First iPhone Game” is now available in Safari Rough Cuts.
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Posts Tagged ‘iphone’
Voices That Matter Conference – 24th to 25th April
I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be speaking at the Voices That Matter conference in Seattle, Washington. The conference runs from April 24th to the 25th and has some great speakers such as Aaron Hillegass the author of Cocoa Programming For Max OS X and founder of the Big Nerd Ranch.
My talk is about learning iPhone game programming and will cover many of the topics I have covered on the blog and inside my forthcoming book “Learning iPhone Game Programming: A hands-On Guide To Building Your First iPhone Game”.
If your in the area it would be good to see you there and if you are a blog reader make sure you come up and say hi :o)
Mike
Book Update
I’ve had a number of people ask about progress with the book, so I thought I would do a quick post about it.
First of all I’m really excited about getting the book completed and into peoples hands. The great feedback I’ve had on the blog has really helped push this project forward and it would be great to get it out to everyone. I’m currently working on the last few chapters and the plan is to have the book up on Safari Rough Cuts in the next few weeks. This will allow people early access to the book and a way to provide feedback before the book is finally published.
The game that accompanies the book, Sir Lamorak’s Quest is also almost finished as you will have seen in SLQ Update post. I’ve just got a little tweaking to do on some AI and then finish the map.
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SLQ Video Update
I’ve created a new video of SLQ to show progress. The game is almost complete now so I wanted to show everyone how it was looking. There are a couple of small areas to still fix. I’m still tweaking some sound effects for example and also working on the final map.
So, I hope you enjoy the preview and a chance to see the game being developed with the book I’m writing.
Mike
Video downloads
We have had a number of requests from people asking if they can download the tutorial videos. This is something we have been looking into for a while so that we can find a solution that is not going to cost a fortune. The amount of bandwidth downloading the videos needs can end up being expensive.
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Bitmap Font Update
I’ve been meaning to update the bitmap font code for a while. I made a number of changes to this code for the book as I found problems with the rendering of characters for some fonts. This was done to bugs in my code that positioned each character rendered. I fixed these for the book code and I’ve just updated the Tutorial 4 project code with the same fixes.
If you were seeing odd alignment of characters then the fixes in the Bitmap Font tutorial code should sort them out. It also ensures that the point provided when rendering text is used as the bottom left hand corner of the first character.
Hope this helps people and let me know how you get on.
Mike
Sound Manager Update
Hi all
By the end of this weekend I will post a new version of the Sound Manager. I’ve been introducing music into SLQ and found that there were some features missing from the SoundManager class that would be handy such as named play lists, fading music etc.
I’ve added these features now as well as fixing memory leaks that had been reported. I just need to work on a couple of areas over the weekend and I’ll then post the new version. I just wanted to keep you up to date.
Mike
The sound of music with Vincent Webb
I’ve been hunting around for a while for the sounds and music I can use for Sir Lamorak’s Quest. As I’m working to a tight budget i.e. nothing, I had dropped the thought of ever getting music created for SLQ specifically. That has changed.
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Project 72
I came across a site yesterday which is documenting in real time a team of four guys who writing an iPhone game in 71 hours, hence the name of the project.
They all seem to have experience already and hence thought they could create the entire game in 7 days, with the actual game coding being done in 71 hours. Their website is tracking a countdown timer and also has a live web cam of them working away. It also has regular video updates of their progress on the game which is not looking bad at all.
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TBXML – XML parsing on the iPhone
Just wanted to remind people about TBXML developed by Tom Bradley. This is an Objective-C based XML parser for the iPhone that is QUICK and light on resources. It has a really simple API and can be implemented really quickly.
If all you want to do is read and parse XML then this is a library you should check out. It is open source so you can see how its been done and change as necessary. If you don’t want to change it yourself then drop Tom a note and he is very quick in making changes that fit with the purpose of the library.
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