Posted on December 30th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Game Developer Magazine has named the finalists for the 2009 Front Line Awards, their 12th annual evaluation of the year’s best game-making tools in the categories of programming, art, audio, game engine, middleware, and books. The following books have been nominated:
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Posted on December 16th, 2009 by James Dessart
An Alternative for Casual Hobbyists
When porting a game of mine to the iPhone, I found I needed a device to test out multi-touch. I didn’t want to spend the $99 a year for the developer program, and I wasn’t willing to jailbreak my brand-new iPod. When I discovered iSimulate, it looked like there was finally an alternative for us casual hobbyists.
For those who do have access to the developer program, iSimulate lets you spend more time in the simulator before deploying, letting you use XCode’s debugging features without hassle. The displays of device input give you an extra level of debugging data that just isn’t available otherwise.
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Posted on December 15th, 2009 by Seth Willits
Gamasutra has posted a postmortem for Freeverse’s game Top Gun. The game was created by uDevGames’ alumni Justin Ficarrotta.
Freeverse designer and programmer Justin Ficarrotta recounts what went right and what went wrong with the development of the iPhone game Top Gun — particularly focusing on how fans should always be in mind when working on a licensed game.
Justin Ficarrotta is a longtime iDevGames member who has created spectacular winning iDevGames contest entries such as Laserface Jones, ARACHNOID: Predator of Worlds, and Kill Dr. Cote.
Related Link: Gamasutra: Top Gun Postmortem
Posted on December 14th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
‘iPhone Game Development’ by Paul Zirkle, Lead Mobile Programmer at Konami Digital Entertainment and Joe Hogue, a mobile programmer with Electronic Arts. Together, provides an experienced iPhone developer with the knowledge needed to make games for the Apple iPhone. Starting with a basic overview of game and technical design particular to the new device, the book moves on to detail the development process with examples. You will find everything from game development basics and an introduction to iPhone programming to tips on using APIs to develop in-game physics and strategies for AppStore publication. Topics include:
- Learn how to develop iPhone games that provide engaging user experiences
- Become familiar with Objective-C and the Xcode suite of tools
- Learn what it takes to adapt the iPhone interface to games
- Create a robust, scalable framework for a game app
- Understand the requirements for implementing 2D and 3D graphics
- Learn how to add music and audio effects, as well as menus and controls
- Get instructions for publishing your game to the App Store
This book promises you everything from game development basics and iPhone programming fundamentals to guidelines for dealing with special graphics and audio needs, creating in-game physics, and much more.
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Posted on December 12th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
The Bork3D Game Engine was built for mobile platforms. It actually has its roots in Rude Engine, a high-performance graphics library for Pocket PC, Symbian and N-Gage. Performance and scalability is considered in every corner of the Bork3D Game Engine. If performance is a criteria for you, seriously consider this engine. Features include: all the source code, OpenGL ES abstraction layer, Debug-rendering API, Component-oriented game object system, High-performance static and boned mesh rendering system w/ tool pipeline for 3dsmax, Maya and Collada, Integration with the Bullet Physics SDK and more. f you or your business earns less than $100,000 per year you qualify for the $49 per developer Indy License. The Professional License is $199. (See the license agreement for exact details). Don’t let the price fool you. We’re just undercutting the competitors to get your attention.
Posted on December 10th, 2009 by Andy Korth
Howling Moon Software announced a new version of the popular Chipmunk Physics engine. Chipmunk is a simple, lightweight and fast 2D rigid body physics library written in C. It’s licensed under the unrestrictive, OSI approved MIT license, meaning it’s free to use even in closed source, commercial games.
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Posted on December 10th, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
The International Mobile Gaming Awards deadline for entries is January 18, 2010. This contest is for iPhone, N-Gage, Flash, Android, Microsoft, Java, Linux, BREW mobile game developers. Submit your games on line now at www.imgawards.com and compete in an international arena with top studios and individual developers from all over the world. Participation is free of charge. The IMGA recognizes the newest, the most exciting and the most innovative games so only those games published after September 1, 2009 are eligible. Concepts and demos for games are also eligible if the entrants can provide a playable demo or a finished game before February 8, 2010 in time for the second judging round. The awards will be handed out at the Mobile World Congress.
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Posted on December 8th, 2009 by Sean Maher
Examples for every iPhone feature
‘iPhone SDK Development’ by Bill Dudney and Chris Adamson is one of the ‘third wave’ of iPhone programming books, and an excellent tour of Cocoa Touch and Xcode — the libraries and IDE for iPhone programming.
Audience
The book assumes that you have some experience with C and/or an object-oriented language. You’re expected to know what pointers and arrays are, and the control structures (for loops, if and switch statements) that are common to most curly-brace languages. This is the Achilles heel of most iPhone and Cocoa books — they assume you have a C or OOP background. In this case the litmus test is page 27 — read that one in the bookstore, and if it makes no sense, put the book back.
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Posted on December 2nd, 2009 by Joe Flores
Still a Solid OOP Cross-Platform Rapid IDE
REALbasic users have been creating and compiling applications on the Mac since 1998. iDevGames’ published a review of REALbasic 5 almost six years ago and most of what was reviewed still applies to the current version of REALbasic — it is still a solid OOP cross-platform rapid IDE. However, REALbasic has also grown up over the intervening five years, and now supports Linux builds, native OpenGL, and a variety of new features and improvements. But is it any good for developing games?
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Posted on December 2nd, 2009 by Carlos Camacho
Power Game Factory is a game creation tool written in REALbasic. Released by Sawblade Software, it has now been open-sourced. This game engine is great for 2D side-scrolling action/adventure games. It features an easy to use graphical user interface and can compile stand-alone game applications that take advantage of the latest graphical technologies.
Power Game Factory is capable of producing games similar to many of the most highly regarded 8-bit and 16-bit console video games, but with far superior graphics and sounds. Best of all, no programming is required.
You’ll need a SourceForge account and REALbasic to take advantage of this game creation tool. Version 1.0 was released for the Macintosh in 2005, and the software received a substantial update in February 2009. The compiled engine includes a sample game called ‘Eskimo vs. Snowmen game.’ (see screenshot)
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