Steve Jobs shaped the way I see the world,
I guess for me it was just life, since I was 4 years old I’ve had a Macintosh in my house, I remember countless hours of drawing with MacPaint and playing Dark Castle. Eventually I would study Software Engineering with the sole idea of making the world a better place by creating software that could impact people lives as Apple products did impact mine.
The Apple Way has brought several opportunities for me, and I can say that I’m one of the few lucky persons (and maybe the only Software Developer) in my country who could actually travel to WWDC (in my case in 2010) and could see Steve Jobs speak that year. While being there, I could realize all the things that I had accomplished in my (still rather short) life, and noticed that I had a vision of the world that without the culture that Steve created would be totally different.
I live every day of my life without any fear of thinking different, and will always chase my dreams with my heart because it’s part of my nature.
Thank you Steve, you and your vision made me a better human being.
You will be missed.
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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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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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It’s been a while!,I’ve been working a lot lately to reach Gando Games Engine alpha state. It has been quite interesting, learning a lot, and even contributing to some Open Source projects.
My motivation for this post however, is that Xcode 4 GM was released officially. I’ve been working with Xcode 4 for a while, and have filed some bug reports on Apple’s Radar. While I really like the whole Xcode 4 concept and features, and I think that they take the whole Xcode experience to a new level, I’m not happy to see Apple, my all-time favorite company to release Xcode in it’s current state. I mean, it happened with Project Builder, but this is 2011, I can’t believe they did the same thing.
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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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To talk about Medium Sized Sprite (from now on MSS) animation and design is not an easy task for me at all, because I don’t consider myself an expert in the subject. On the contrary, I’m still experimenting a lot to try to improve my results. But it is because of this reason that the following article could be useful for the people who is just starting out in Pixel Art, or even for veteran artists who could share their experience. I won’t pretend to write an all-around Game Pixel Art Style guide, but instead I will to try to present and discuss some issues that could result (and in my particular case, have been) very useful when designing pixel based sprites for games.
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Nicolas will be attending to Apple’s WWDC 2010. He’s expecting to meet new people, have a good time, and of course to learn new cutting-edge technologies that can help us to make better Games. If you want to meet Nicolas at WWDC or in San Francisco, near Moscone Center to have a cool chat about Game Development, you can always contact Nicolas via Twitter @ngoles.
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