Status update

Hey everyone,

Long time with no posts, focusing more on work I guess ( so no that bad ), so here I present you a brief update of what have we been doing at Gando Games.

• Created a build server for our iPhone projects, we are actually running “Jenkins CI” on our Virtual host, with build nodes located at our “offices” ( garages would be a more appropriate term for that ). We are actually using a custom build script, it’s quite similar to this one (presented in this Stack Overflow post). The build server has been quite awesome, and I feel really good about having spent the time to configure it, basically it does nightly builds and also runs a Unit/Acceptance battery of tests in Release and Debug mode (currently only on simulator, but I’m working on getting it to run the tests in-device too).
• I mentioned Unit Tests in last post, I always heard wonders about TDD and how it could help a project in many different ways. Well, I spent a lot of time reading about TDD in Game Development and also as a methodology itself and I got to say that It’s been great, now I feel a lot safer when refactoring.

I mostly used two books as a reference:

I’m not really doing a lot of OOP, but “Growing object-oriented Software, Guided by Tests” is a great book with a modern approach. A lot of what is there can be applied to other programming paradigms. I also read all of Noel Llopis posts about TDD applied to Game Development. He has a lot of blog posts in this area and I must say, they where very helpful.

• Jorge has been working like crazy on our “Collaborative” Game Prototyping tools, he’s been working on some Web Based tools and also exploring technologies like CouchDB for our distributed DB needs. CouchDB looks really nice and there’s an iOS port on github and an android port is also planned.
• Pablo has been developing the Alpha 2D sprite sheet for the main character of our upcoming game ( which is still in early development, but in the works ).

So that’s it for now, now back to work!

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