I believe that smartphones and FB are the primary catalysts for casual games becoming truly mainstream. However, these games are usually frown upon by hardcore gamers who prefer skill-based, competitive games. Quake, Counter Strike, Starcraft are all great examples of … Continue reading →
After an admittedly long absence from our allotted iDevBlogADay schedule, I would like to share my thoughts about the difficulties of beta testing. We have conducted a few beta tests in the past for iOS products and I am beginning to understand the underlying problems that probably many other dev teams are struggling with: beta tests are [...]
Recently I have been thinking more and more about the question: what am I really doing when I’m writing code? Sure, we have been developing iOS games since 2008 so the answer seems straightforward, but if I stop and take an honest look, the answer is pretty astonishing. Most of the time I’ve spent with [...]
In today’s iDevBlogADay post I wanted to discuss a little bit about the 22nd Dec phenomenon and why we are not going to participate in it. Currently we are creating a huge update to Soctics and creating a separate HD and a Mac App version of it and our original plan was to release all [...]
Today’s iDevBlogADay entry is going to be part rant and part hack. As any small dev with a tight budget, we are also continuously looking for wallet-friendly new ways to engage our audience. Recently we have decided to give away iTunes Gift Cards for a few of our users who responded to our announcement. We thought [...]
For this iDevBlogADay post, I have decided to go non-technical and share my thought about how I see it would be possible to survive as az indie developer in the current markets. My goal with this post is also to start a conversation with the rest of you, I am curious about what you think [...]
In my last post for iDevBlogADAy, I showed you how one can build on a simple CALayer subclass to create a resource-friendly, custom looking number display (eg. for showing scores) for your game. In this post, I will use the same base class in a useful example on how you can implement a healthbar / [...]
When creating a game, an informative and seamlessly integrated HUD is crucial to provide feedback to players. Using the built-in system fonts could really hurt the aesthetic appeal of your game and you should always do your best to make the graphical style coherent in the whole app. Using CALayers for your HUD can help [...]
My last iDevBlogADay post revolved around displaying user comments in your app by using the Disqus REST API service. Part 1 can be found here. Now it is time to talk about how it is possible to enable a user to post a comment from within your App! Disqus offers a basic package for your [...]
When trying to build a community for your app, you have to go with every possibility to help your users interact easily with each other. Implementing your own, full-fledged commenting / voting system might be a tedious work and it might be worth it to integrate existing solutions into your app. This is what we [...]
