I don’t think I should go all over the “Why is continuous integration important?” topic all over again!, there are many great articles about it ( I recommend you to read Build Server: The Hearbeat of The Project by Noel Llopis ). So, we know that continuous integration is great, it avoids several things that can slow us down, or can even degrade the quality of our products.
Some of this things are:
- Making sure our project builds on all platforms.
- Making sure the Unit Test and Integration Tests pass on all platforms.
- Creating different build setups for Beta Testers / Production / Debugging
- Letting the person that broke the build know where did it happen immediately.
This things are great when working alone as a “Single Man Team”, but I think continuous integration is a must when working on a 2+ persons team. Seriously, I can’t count the number of hours saved by using C.I, it’s just so great to be able to send the beta testers a URL address so that they can get the “goods” 
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For this week iDevBlogADay post, I will talk about how I use Jenkins to build Xcode projects. Remember that you can always follow me on Twitter if you want to contact me directly 
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Hello again!,
It’s a nice day in the French Riviera ( or Côte d’azur )!, it’s been more work than pleasure here, but I guess life is good
Nice Ville
In this iDevBlogADay post I will describe how we managed to automate our needs for Xcode 4 template generation. We wanted to automate it because we use a little Engine here at Gando Games (GG), and project templates where more or less a must for us. I have been reading everywhere about project templates in Xcode 4, and I must admit that it’s a rather obscure process. In order to understand a bit more, I followed the Boreal’s Kiss “A minimal project template for Xcode 4” article. After reading it, I realized that since our toolset was changing quite often, we where going to need to somehow automate the generation of Xcode 4 Templates for our internal engine, plus I thought it was a cool thing to do
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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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I’m back!,
It’s great to be writing for iDevBlogADay again!, I’ve been very busy since the last time I wrote, mostly because I’m in the process of starting my Informatics Engineering Student Thesis, which I’ll begin as soon as I get myself to France, which should happen by July 31. I’ve been working quite hard the last couple of months, exploring new technologies and trying to figure out how they could fit in the Mobile Games world. One of the technologies that I had heard about in the past was the NoSQL databases.
A NoSQL database attempts to solve many problems that you can face with a typical SQL database on a broad set of applications. They don’t require fixed table schemas, they try to eliminate join operations and in most cases scale horizontally. This article aims to talk a bit about some database implementations that solve some interesting issues that are experienced in the realm of mobile games.
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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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In the last week
article we discussed some basic things about the luabind library and how to integrate it to your Xcode project. For this week
iDevBlogADay post, I will show you how to expose some more complex C++ code to the Lua runtime.
I also want to add that I’m on vacations in Cordoba Argentina, and that this post was published ( or not ), using the wordpress scheduling function ( which I really hope to work without any issue! ).
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