HUDTube, our little player for the web video, that let’s you listen to the music and view other interesting stuff outside of the browser was just updated! Now you can easily share links to things you like directly from HUDTube’s window without a hassle. More awesome updates are coming very soon!
Today we’re releasing new Nozbe for iPhone and Nozbe for iPad versions – 2.3 and 1.3 respectively. Every developer knows how difficult synchronization complex data (like your tasks, project, context, delegations, etc) among many devices and the cloud can be, but we were working hard to make it better and much more effective for all Nozbe Apps users. We are very grateful for all the feedback we’ve received during testing and hope to bring you future releases much, much more often.
What’s new? We’ve spent most of the time during development of this update on making synchronization much more efficient and easier to use. Now you can also call, email and open links from your tasks. We’ve also made our apps ready for upcoming iOS 5 release, so you don’t have to worry about that either. Above all, we’ve fixed lots and lots of small bugs and optimized Nozbe Apps even more to ensure that you are even more productive!
If you’d like to be the first to know about future updates and help us test them, please leave your e-mail address here. Any feedback will be greatly appreciated!
Latest Code Pilot 2 version includes support for Xcode versions that I’m even afraid to name.
Here’s the direct download link: http://updates.macoscope.net/codepilot2beta/CodePilot2-2.0b7.zip
Code Pilot 2.0 was just released. This version includes support for Xcode 4.0.2 (on Snow Leopard) as well as Xcode 4.1 (on Lion). We also have a sparkling new UI design this time:
Code Pilot 2.0
Please see Code Pilot’s new website to get the new version!
We’re working hard to bring Code Pilot to Xcode 4, but unfortunately it seems that we’ve missed “end of March” kind of deadline already. We are testing our internal alpha version right now and hope to have a beta ready in 7-10 days from now. Anyone who would like to help us test upcoming beta builds, please drop me a line at zbigniew@macoscope.net. And keep your fingers crossed :-)
As you may have noticed, Circuloid is now available in App Store both for iPad and iPhone. To celebrate we will talk about our experiences and lessons learnt during the whole process of making a game. Circuloid is our company’s first game title released for iOS and, for most of our team members, a first game released ever. That fact, we suppose, allowed us to have a fresh look at the whole process.
We plan to publish series of posts created by different team members describing interesting aspects of work with Circuloid believing that our experiences can be useful for other developers willing to create or just creating their first game.
In the first part I will mostly try to describe how the game concept was born.
…for those of you who need a few words of explanation about Circuloid :)
Circuloid is Macoscope’s tribute to a great family of arkanoid-style brick-breaker games. We took this old concept then twisted it a bit, and bent it around until we got some interesting shapes in hand. As you can guess from its name – Circuloid is basically an arkanoid game, based on a round board, but that is not all.
The original idea came to my mind with my first use of iPhone. “It would be great to have an arkanoid played with a whole device” I thought. Unfortunately, as a man whose computer addiction was born in the good old days of C64, I had a rather steady picture of all arkanoid games as one breed.
More or less static colorful bricks hit by the ball. It does not sound as an exciting game for today’s players, right? It was obvious for me that gameplay needs to be a little bit refreshed. Obvious choice – adding real physics to the game. Real physics means not only a simple application of the laws of reflection, but also of friction, elasticity, etc.
Considering the above-mentioned way of refreshing an old game concept, I was absolutely sure that this is almost impossible if you are targeting (somehow limited) mobile devices.
Things got changed when I saw a short movie of Hyperballoid2 gameplay. My mind exploded when I saw what happens when some physics are applied to this old genre. Bricks now can rotate, move, slide, explode, etc. etc. I started to rework the problem: “maybe there is a simple way to add physics…” and of course after a few hours I knew that my original assumption was wrong. There are simple frameworks ready to be used, to drive a flat 2D world even on mobile devices – Chipmunk, Box2D to name a few. That’s how we get to the first lesson – don’t assume, check and then check again!
The next “big idea” came from an observation. When you are holding your iPhone on its shorter sides and start to rotate the whole device as a kind of steering-wheel your hands are drawing small fragments of circles in the air. This observation inspired me. What if the whole game playing field will be changed from a rectangle to a circle?
The original rectangle shape was born, I believe, to properly fill the only display device of those days – a TV screen. Obviously, no one thought back then about rotating an over 100-pound TV set just to bounce a funny ball on the screen…
Changing the basic shape of a game play-field seemed to be an interesting mutation. Here we have the second lesson learnt – new devices bring the new ways of interacting with them, so keep your eyes open!
That is how Circuloid’s game concept was born. The rest of the improvements or enrichments were born “on the table” during the whole development process.
We all know that for most of the time development is a rather boring process of changing pure idea into something that can be tested by other human beings. Of course in the next parts we will share with you a few fine-grained development details. For today I would rather like to share one observation about the development time.
You may think that a great gameplay makes a great game. It’s true, but only partially. Great gameplay can easily become a social meme. It will also be appreciated and maybe even awarded. Unfortunately from the developers’ perspective game is a mix of great gameplay plus lots of boring stuff: menus, intro screen, settings, hall of fame, scores serialization and storage module, mechanisms to freeze, pause and restart the whole game, etc. Most of them can be easily implemented, but it does not mean that they are zero effort tasks. So the third lesson, probably well-known to some of you: transition from the prototype game to a market ready product always takes longer than you expect.
For the scientific minds among you, here is a very rough math rule that I “invented”: time needed to finish a game is equal to the time needed to finish a prototype expressed in the next time unit in increasing order plus 50 per cent. Example: if your prototype took 4 weeks to build, your game will be ready in (4+2) months :)
That is like gravity, we may not agree that we are falling, but our disagreement will not change the reality. Gravity just has us.
That’s all for part one.
Next time Tomek will reveal the secret details of graphic design for Circuloid. Stay tuned!
We have received a lot of questions on whether Code Pilot will support Xcode 4 or not, and if it will – how much will the upgrade cost. It’s not an easy matter, because new Xcode is entirely different beast on the inside. Basically, all code allowing Code Pilot to interact with IDE has to be rewritten from scratch and that’s why we can’t “just release” another version of CP after checking that everything is compatible and works beautifully.
Nevertheless, we have started working on Code Pilot 2.0, with Xcode 4 support in mind. We’re hoping to have a beta version ready by the end of March if everything goes well.
Code Pilot 2.0 will be priced the same as the current version. Everyone who bought CP 1.x in 2011 before the 2.0 version’s release, will get the new version completely free of charge, everyone else gets the 2.x license with 50% discount.
And one more thing – we’ve decided that all the profit that we will generate this month on Code Pilot sales will go directly to developersAgainstPoverty.org campaign for clean water. We strongly encourage you to donate as well.
Code Pilot 1.2.3 was just released. It includes support for latest Xcode 3.2.5 pre-release beta3.
Here’s a direct link to Code Pilot 1.2.3 package.
Together with OneStep we’ve created an iPhone app for comfortable shopping, which is very easy in use. We recommend it to everyone! Simply said: shopping with our application boils down to one step.
So, you ask, how is the magic done? It’s quite simple. When you stumble upon an interesting book review, you can instantly order it. How you say? You just have to scan the QRCode with OneStep logo located near the review in a magazine and confirm the order. After a couple of days you will get the item by post (this is where you pay).
QRCode
After scanning the desired item you will also be able to see items recommended especially for you, which you might find interesting.
Application is available on the App Store. For more information please visit http://www.one-step.pl (Polish only).
Code Pilot 1.2.2 was just released. It includes support for latest Xcode 3.2.5 pre-release beta2.
Here’s a direct link to Code Pilot 1.2.2 package.