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 
(more…)
More
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:
(more…)
More
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.
(more…)
More