Posts tagged with: ‘game development’
Posted by Patrick on Monday, February 14, 2011Mon, Feb 14, 2011
Yesterday @GavinBowman asked me about my experience using Game Center for the multiplayer mode in Swivel. So here is a brain dump of my thoughts on the subject. I apologize in advance for the somewhat rambling nature of it. If you have any specific questions beyond what I cover, feel free to ask in the comments. I won’t go into any code but if there is interest it can be the subject of …
Posted by Patrick on Sunday, October 24, 2010Sun, Oct 24, 2010
Last night I was playing an idle game of Swivel before bed. I posted a score of around 3,500,000. A few days before that I posted 800,000. Until that point I had a threshold of about 250,000. I must admit I felt like some kind of Zen master racking up a 65x chain combo. It was a curiously placid experience, however, as if my brain managed to read the pattern of blocks and knew what to do with it.…
Posted by Patrick on Saturday, August 07, 2010Sat, Aug 07, 2010
Swivel is entering the gun lap. There’s still plenty to do, but I feel like the end is in sight. This has prompted me to consider what can be done to speed up the final development stage. As many developers know, scope creep is a real danger — particularly right at the end of a project. But sometimes early scope creep in the heady, naive days of initial design sticks around ri…
Posted by Patrick on Wednesday, August 04, 2010Wed, Aug 04, 2010
A six-minute gameplay video along with some commentary on Swivel. It gives more information about the game and shows it off running on the new retina display. Sorry it’s a bit fuzzy — I recorded it with my camcorder since the iPhone 4 simulator runs too slow on my iMac when you crank up the HD graphics (crazy, I know!). The game still runs a smooth 60 frames per second on the…
Posted by Patrick on Tuesday, January 05, 2010Tue, Jan 05, 2010
This is what I’m working on as I find the time. The mechanic is simple: rotate groups of four blocks clockwise or counter clockwise to match four or more adjacent blocks. Bonuses can be generated for matching more than four blocks, rematching (adding a block to a match in progress), combos (matching within moments of the last match), and chains (causing additional matches by a match).…
Posted by Patrick on Saturday, December 12, 2009Sat, Dec 12, 2009
Most of my game development on the iPhone is done in C++, not Objective C. I feel like this has its benefits, but it also has drawbacks, not the least of which is that programming user interfaces can get really messy. The Cocoa delegates model is wonderfully powerful for that kind of thing. The easiest model I’ve seen in C++ is the signals and slots model used, most notably, by QT. My ga