Hello everyone,
I finally arrived to Nice Ville, France. There has been some complications with my residence for the next 6 months which I hope to resolve tomorrow! 
, appart from that I’m happy to be here and excited to work on an interesting topic! Anyway, I’ve been a bit short on time and also very tired ( 13 hours flight to Madrid from Santiago, and then 2 hours from Madrid to Nice, and +6 hours of time difference with Chile!! ).
For this post I want to discuss/(public brainstorm) about how would I prefer to work with a Level Editor, and mainly about the target platform for this tool. To be a bit clear, we have a simple internal 2d Game Engine at Gando Games… we are actually planning to Open Source it, but with all the great 2d Game Engines currently available we’re not sure about it.
A Level Editor, even in a basic stage, can provide a huge boost to productivity for repetitive tasks like level design, prototyping and Game Entity creation. Our rather simple engine is quite focused on fast prototyping, it has pretty good scripting support using Lua, mainly as an option to describe Game Scenes, Entities, and other game specific elements. This is all very cool, but I’ve been discussing with Jorge (front-end Engineer), and he agrees that a Level Editor could could speed up the whole creative process.
I’m just thinking out loud here and I would really appreciate feedback on this matter, our main concern now is the level editor target platform. What I mean with this is that, yes it’s cool to have a level editor on an iPad/iPhone, but I think I’m far more proficient using my MacBook/Mac Mini to create a level, still this has lead us to think about two main alternatives:
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Who's this guy ?
As you already know, the rules have changed ( for good! ) in iDevBlogADay! This will be my last post for iDevBlogADay (at least in a while ), and I pretend to update you all on some of our activities here at Gando Games!.
Before starting I’ll have to say that I will still post once every two weeks (so please subscribe to our RSS !) to tell you what’s going on here at gando games and of course give you some articles like I’ve been doing for the last 10 posts 
. Pablo, our art director also wanted to make a guest post of his own, but he was on vacations the last three weeks!, but keep hanging on it, I can asure you guys that it will be worth it.
So, to the updates:
This week has been a crazy one!, lot’s and lot’s of work!
- We have a new member here at Gando Games, Jorge Soto! ( @ajeo ) Web Development expert but never afraid of doing some low level coding! He’s our Tools Engineer ( and like everyone here, he will probably end up working on a lot of different things )
- I had to finish the arrangements for a 7 months trip to Sophia Antipolis, France this year (Jul 2011 – Jan 2012), I will be there making a R & D internship at INRIA… so if anyone happens to live there and wants to hang out, it would be amazing!
- I still haven’t finished configuring Gando Games virtual build server!, ( in case you’re wondering what’s a build server, or why could you need it, I recommend you to read Snappy Touch amazing article about it ).
- Gando Games 2D Game Engine is taking shape !, I really hope to show you a bit of it soon, it’s an engine quite focused on designers and rapid prototyping, more about that in the future!
To close off this rather short note, I really want to thank Miguel a.k.a Mystery Coconut, all of iDevBlogADay writers and of course the readers for making this service awesome!. I really like the new format, and I think that making one post per two weeks is really the best way to bring better articles to the readers.
till the next one,
PS: I hope to be able to tell you who’s the guy in the picture sooner than later, 
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Before getting into the actual article I want to remember everyone that the rules for iDevBlogADay have changed, and in two more weeks the current authors will be rotated out. The new system sounds very nice , but since Gando Games will disappear from the official RSS , if you guys want to keep reading I encourage you to subscribe to our RSS feed .
Now, the article:
I get this question a lot, there many books in the subject , but I’m totally sure that you can get started without even looking at them. For today’s iDevBlogADay post, I made a “straight to the point guide”.
Note: This guide is also valid for iPod Touch and iPad.
What you’ll need:
* A Mac ( you could get away with VMware but I won’t go into that ) [ 699 USD$ ]
* Sign-up as an Apple Developer [0 USD$]
* Xcode [Free Download as a registered iOS developer ]
* Cocos2d [Free Download & Open Source]
* Google
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For today’s
iDevBlogADay post I want to tell you guys a rather short but true story that reflects some of our duties as developers for any particular platform. I came to this conclussions after installing beta software ( under NDA ) for the platform we are developing for in Gando Games.
Because of an NDA agreement I will reffer to this product as “Pudding“
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Hello, for today’s
iDevBlogADay entry I want to share my top 10 books in the topic of software development/game development. I was tempted to put “Game Development” as a title, but the most useful books that I have read, are not explicitly related to Game Development ( still they cover lot’s and lot’s of useful techniques that can be applied to that specific topic ).
I’ve been trying to learn more and more to improve my engineering/developer skills, I’ve read a ton of books… but here I present you my 10 favorites in no particular order, they all have impacted me in different but positive ways!
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To change the technical line of posts, for today’s iDevBlogADay article I will write a bit about my history with Video Games and why I ended up developing them (or at least trying to), I also promise you to not extend the post too much.
Disclaimer: this is not the geek story of “I started programming when I was 4 years old, and wrote a BASIC interpreter at the age of 5″
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Hello again, for this
iDevBlogADay post I want to take a little break from technical articles to talk you a bit about what are we doing here at Gando Games, and tell you a little of our rather short history.
Gando Games was born about one year ago, I ( Nicolas ) wanted to do Game Development since I had been doing it on my own for about a year. I produced several prototypes for iPhone/iPod Touch, and even if I felt that I was learning quite a bit, I could see that to produce something more polished I was going to need help ( at least in the art department ). That’s when I talked with my old friend Pablo. I’ve known Pablo since I was 6 years old, we met in Kinder Garden!. Pablo has a Bachelor Degree in Fine Arts, and when I started thinking about something like an Art Director for Gando Games I knew that he was the right guy for the Job, I mean, not a lot of artists have played Diablo II 24/7 for months, same could be said for a lot of Games like Warcraft III, Quake II, Quake III, Mortal Kombat, etc.
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I (Nicolas Goles) travelled all the way from Chile to represent Gando Games at Apple WWDC 2010. In this brief Article I will present some insights about what went right and wrong for me in the whole event. I had a great time there, it was amazing, and I really wanted to have some time to write a bit and share my experience. In the last part of the article, I will present some small tips that I think are worthy of consideration if you are planning to attend Apple WWDC in the future. (Also… there’s a video surprise at the end of the post, so read on… )
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So, we’ve talked about our game, and so far, this is what we’ve told you:
- 2D Action/RPG iPhone game
- Visually fantastic, with lots of underground scenes
So, what’s missing? Guessing by the title of this post, you’re right: The name
Of course, since day 1, we’ve been referring to the game by a nickname (and, as my co-workers suggest, I can’t reveal that 
). In each and every meeting that we’ve had, one of the subjects to discuss that comes up every time is:
“So, what’s going to be the name of our game?”
“Eerrhm… we have more important things to discuss, like this game mechanic or this wall that we’ve just ran into”
“Ok, we’ll define the name later”
However, now is becoming a pressing issue, and to be honest, a very hard one to solve!
The first thing we came up with, was a long list of keywords that define the nature of our game, and see if the pieces fit; combining them in a matrix of prefixes and suffixes; the process has been rather messy, specially cause all the “good names” are already taken and we don’t want to settle with a mediocre name.
Another option was to give our main character a name (which I have to add, some of us don’t want) and then call the game “X’s story”, but being a more action driven game rather than exploration/character development (elements that surely will be there, but not as the main focus), it could come up rather misleading. Likewise, if we just give a cool name to our game, we could make that same mistake.
We still don’t have a name; we’re trying to find that fine balance between stating the obvious, you know, a name that says “This is an action/RPG game” and at the same time, an interesting title that you can tell your friends about “Hey, I’m playing xxx, it’s awesome”
Who thought that something so simple could be so troublesome?
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