Not that easy to create a "flight control" type game as first thought

I was reading this article by Mike Nachbaur which was quite amazing. From short video below you can see the car running on the track.Demo Video:This reminds me of the Starter Kit - Line Drawing Game and thought I can just extend the idea a bit and create some sort of prototype quickly. As looks like the only difference is: Mike's demo has the race track hard coded. All I have to do is merge it with some "touch" code, right?Wrong! May be it's just I am not up to that level yet, as after a few tests, it's definitely not as easy as I first thought!At first, spent some time studying "bezier curve"...

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Have a look at this "iOS Game Revenue Survey" result

Thanks to Owen Goss for organising this "iOS Game Revenue Survey" and the result is available here, I think everyone should have a look as the result is quite interesti...

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Is having a constant/similar style important?

While still working on my next project, I started spending some time analysing some of the popular games available at the moment. One of the topic I am looking at, is the constant/similar style of game design.As you might be aware, the games from Nimblebit has always been quite popular. I love the "Tiny Tower", "Textropolis" and "Sky Burger", while my kids are big fans of "Pocket Frogs".However, if you compare between the games from Nimblebit, the style seems to be quite different between most of...

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How many lines of code required to play an Audio file?

While looking at codes required to play an audio file, I found huge differences between different books/resources.In the book iOS 4 Programming Cookbook, it talks about:1. Adding " <AVAudioPlayerDelegate> " to the .h file of the ViewController2. Create 2 methods:- (void)audioPlayerDidFinishPlaying:(AVAudioPlayer *)player successfully:(BOOL)flag;- (void) startPlayingAudio;3. in viewDidUnload, you have to do the following:    if (self.audioPlayer != nil) {        if([self.audioPlayer isPlaying] == YES){            [self.audioPlayer...

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Wolfenstein 3D for iPhone Ver 1.0 working on Simulator

Yeah! I finally got "Wolfenstein 3D for iPhone" Ver 1.0 working on iPhone Simulator, and the sound works too, pretty cool!Note: have to disable "GLimp_AppActivate( active );" and "GLimp_Shutdown();" in "opengl_main.c" to allow it to compile and run on Simulator. Read on the net that you only need those files when you are running/compiling it for the actual device.Also read this article by Fabien Sanglard which provides some info about the code. But as I know nothing about Open GL yet, so it's still...

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Stop killing open source!!

Noticed this game called "Bubble Explosion" almost identical to ABC123 - sequence in App Store. It was originally selling for $1.99, now reduced to free.Alright, to be fair, this guy did change the background colour from green to blue, the front menu, and when the game starts, the background bubble image wasn't displayed.Other than those mentioned above, everything is identical. Yes, even the font, the bubble image, the labels, the messages, everything... I guess that's where all those copyright/legal...

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Originality doesn't matter - as long as yours is better!

I was reading this article "Does originality matter?" on "Roach Puppy Games". Chris compared the popular "Angry Bird" game with an earlier game called "Crush the Castle" and it's quite obvious which one should be the first to come up with the original idea. However we all know the huge difference between the result.That inspired me a lot. As long as yours is better, who cares if you are the first one who comes up with the idea?Then, how to make your application better?I can think of one thing - the most important factor that makes Apple so different from any other companies - the user experience....

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Gideros studio - develop iPhone apps without Mac?

Saw ManiacDev mentioned about this new free "Lua Game Development Tool" called Gideros Studio.Had a quick look and it looks quite interesting. One of the most important feature would be it allows you to develop iPhone/iPad apps completely on Windows platform - believe Apple won't be happy about that!As you still have to learn this script language called "Lua", so it surely wouldn't be as easy for non-technical background people as GameSalad. Plus looks like it's still quite new and lacks lots of information (e.g. Tutorials, real apps submitted to App Store, ...etc), so might still have to wait...

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Error "EXC_BAD_ACCESS" fixed by adding "retain" to NSString

Was working on my next project and for some unknown reason, during the main loop it will work perfectly on 1st round, but then always crashed with this strange "EXC_BAD_ACCESS" error which I never seen before. Sometimes it shows this screen full of assembly languages as shown below.Sometimes it's like this:Tried lots of different things, like restructuring the classes, moving methods up and down the hierarchy, add lots of NSLog and checking object allocation/deallocation, check for memory leak in...

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Use 'ima4' compression to reduce CAF file size during conversion

While playing with sound, the most frequently encountered problem will be file format conversion.Apple has this Technical Q&A QA1534 which talks about how to create .CAF files from .AIF files using "afconvert" utility.If you searched on the net you can also find lots of info about converting MP3/WAV to CAF files.However I couldn't find much information about how to reduce the .CAF file size. Of course you can reduce the bit rate, but that would more or less reduced the quality of the .CAF file.Later...

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Error "Undefined symbols for architecture i386: _OBJC_CLASS_$_AVAudioPlayer referenced from: objc-class-ref"

Was away on holiday last week. Of course I brought my MacBook Pro with me. Unfortunately there's no Internet access, which is extremely painful...I was playing around with the Core Animation Demo by Bob McCune and created this very simple sound testing project.But whenever I tried to compile the project, as below it kept showing this error:Undefined symbols for architecture i386: _OBJC_CLASS_$_AVAudioPlayer referenced from: objc-class-refAnd without Internet Access I was stuck for the whole week,...

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Yes! You can play Audio and Movies from iPhone Simulator!!

From this link on maniacdev.com I downloaded the Core Animation Demo by Bob McCune, and to my greatest delight I found that this demo project can play sound and video!! How Amazing!I haven't work out how to do that yet, a quick look at the "resources" group in the project shows the Audio is in ".caf" format and the video is in ".m4v" format. Will certainly spend more time to learn a bit more about th...

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Instrument 4.1 (Build 4138)/ Xcode 4.1 (Build 4B110) still hung when profiling Project from Apple on OS X 10.7 Lion

I was thinking, may be it's my code - won't be too surprise if a project written by newbie like me causing problems isn't it?Ok, so I then tried this "AlternateView" sample code from Apple, and guess what? It hung too!! Ha ha, that makes me feel much better...Tried to search Internet and found this post on stack overflow.com about similar issue.It also talks about starting up Instrument first, then switch back to Xcode to do profiling. I was able to get it working once, and then it stops responding again....This is very painful, will wait for Apple to fix it then. Before that, will have to do...

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Problem with Instrument 4.1 (Build 4138)/ Xcode 4.1 (Build 4B110) running on Lion OS X 10.7?

I was testing my new "Memorise Me If You Can" game on my new 13" MacBook Pro running Lion OS X 10.7 using the Instrument/XCode 4.1. Noticed whenever I started Instrument it just hung and I wasn't able to stop or quit or pause it. Only way to stop is "Force Quite" which is quite annoying.Wonder if any one experiencing same problem? I then run the same thing on another OS X 10.6.7 with Instrument/XCode 4.0, it works perfectly without any problem. I can stop or quite at any time.I have posted 2 videos as below, 1st from 10.6.7 with Instrument/XCode 4.0, the 2nd one from 10.7 with Instrument 4.1...

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3rd Open Source Game - Memorise Me If You Can!!

As mentioned in previous post, I finally got the whole game working, and tested/approved by my 10 years old "iPhone game testing" specialist.I decided to call it "Memorise Me If You Can !!" The game is based on ABC123 and it's so simple that it shouldn't require any further explanation. I have posted this short demo video on YouTube:I have added quite a few features to make it more interesting and easy to play, I think any one can at least easily reach level 10.I learned from playing the popular...

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Working on another game similar to "ABC123"

There's this very old post on iPhoneDevSDK site in 2009 which "kwigbo" announced about publishing full source code for his "ABC123" cocos2d game. Unfortunately that link no long works and I wasn't able to find any source code on his site either.Based on the same idea, I am currently working on "my implementation" of a game similar to "ABC123". I haven't learn COCOS2D yet, so all in basic iPhone code. Already finished the logic, display and other stuffs. Only got a few things left like showing/keeping the score, showing how many "tries", ...etc. Hopefully can get it completed within the next few...

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