Managing Data Relationships
I’ve been meaning to put up the rest of the Inner Product columns I wrote for Game Developer Magazine, but I wasn’t finding the time. With all the recent discussion on data-oriented design, I figured...
View ArticleRemote Game Editing
I’ve long been a fan of minimal game runtimes. Anything that can be done offline or in a separate tool, should be out of the runtime. That leaves the game architecture and code very lean and simple....
View ArticlePrototyping: You’re (Probably) Doing It Wrong
You’re not alone, I was also doing prototyping wrong until a few years ago. There are probably many different ways of prototyping games correctly, and maybe your way works great for you. In that case,...
View ArticleGoogle App Engine As Back End For iPhone Apps
As soon as a game involves servers, there’s no such a thing anymore as “ship and forget”. Flower Garden put this in evidence about a month ago when I started getting complaints from users that the...
View ArticleLag: The Bane Of Touch Screens
Lag in games is as inevitable as taxes. It’s something we can try to minimize, but we always need to live with it. Earlier this week, I noticed that input for my new iPad game was very laggy....
View ArticleLife In The Top 100 And The Google App Engine
A few weeks ago I wrote about using the Google App Engine as a back end for Flower Garden. One of the comments I heard from several people is that the Google App Engine pricing scheme is “scary” due to...
View ArticleStart Pre-allocating And Stop Worrying
One of the more frequent questions I receive is what kind of memory allocation strategy I use in my games. The quick answer is none (at least frame to frame, I do some allocation at the beginning of...
View ArticleThe Curious Case of Casey and The Clearly Deterministic Contraptions
As we gear up for Casey’s Contraptions launch on May 19th, this is the first post in a series dealing with different aspects of the game. I’m planning on covering technical aspects like today, but also...
View ArticleMy Fear of Middleware
Once upon a time, the idea of using some kind of middleware or major external library in my projects was out of the question. Writing all my code was the one and true way! I had a bad case of NIH...
View ArticleWriting Reusable Code
Some people asked what I meant by a “toolkit architecture” in the previous post about my middleware fears. It turns out I wrote about that in a previous Inner Product column that for some reason I...
View ArticleAnalytics For iOS Games
Unlike a lot of console and PC games, most mobile and web games keep evolving over time [1]. It’s up to a game’s designers to ultimately decide how to change and improve the game, but the more data...
View ArticleURL Shorteners In Under Two Minutes
This morning I added the goo.gl URL shortener to Flower Garden, so I thought a quick post with sample code might be helpful for other developers looking to do something similar. I use the URL shortener...
View ArticleiCloud Demystified
Play a game on a device, put it down, pick up another device, and continue playing exactly where you left off. This is the future of games. That future is a reality today for some games and apps...
View ArticlePorting My Game Code To Mac OS
I’m still working on prototypes. I’ve spent the last six months going through different game ideas and working on prototype after prototype. Along the way I’ve made over 20 different prototypes on iPad...
View ArticleUsing SQLite to Organize Design Data
I haven’t written purely about tech in a long time, but this is a particularly interesting intersection of tech and game design, so I thought I would share it with everybody. Be warned though: This is...
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