One of the sessions I saw at GDC this year was Palm’s talk about their new PDK (i.e. their native SDK). The promise was a Linux based mobile device featuring SDL and OpenGL ES. Since my Windows and Linux code base also uses SDL and OpenGL, that certainly caught my attention. In theory, all I need to do is just recompile my Linux version with their tools and I’m done, right?...
Wow! So that was iPad launch day. I’ll talk a little more about the “day 1 FREE” experiment after some results. Just before disappearing, the game was sitting at #60 in the Top FREE Apps (#13 Top FREE Games). Earlier today, I caught it at #55. Anyways, I said I wasn’t going to talk about this! Like many other developers, I shipped the game to Apple for launch day without actually testing it on a real device....
Or in other words, awesome C an C++ language features you’ll learn to love in GCC, that’ll break your heart if you ever have to use Visual Studio. 😉 This is a list I collected whilst getting my Smiles PC code to compile with Visual Studio 2008. Most have no equivalent in Visual Studio, but one simply has a slightly different syntax (compatible too). As before, long and technical. Hit the link if you’re up for the challenge. You’ve been warned. 😀 ...
One of the things on my blogging TODO list is to show how I work. Many coders find it odd to hear that I work on Windows without Visual Studio, or that I work on the Mac by rarely touching the Mac. Just me, a text editor (a good one), and a bunch of useful scripting. In my current project though (Smiles PC), I’ve run in to a slight brick wall that requires me and my development arch nemesis to join forces. It’s almost funny, but it’s been about 10 years since I’ve had to touch a Microsoft compiler. Normally I’d be reluctant, but we’re talking a distribution issue here… and that’s how I get paid. 😉 So, today’s when I swallow my command line pride and get Smiles building with Visual Studio. This post is long, nuanced, technical, and mostly for my own benefit. So if you’re up for an over analysis of Windows Developers favorite development tool, hit the link. ...
This is not what I’ve been up to all year, but it is what I’m up to right now. So, let’s introduce the project. Officially, the project is named Smiles. Specifically though, the project’s working title is Smiles PC. Just as you’d expect, it’s Smiles the iPhone game for PC, Mac and Linux. Actually it’s more than that, but lets stick with this for now. At it’s core, Smiles PC is about removing the dependencies of the iPhone from the game....
As planned, Smiles Zen 1.3 and Smiles Drop 1.3 were sent late Friday night (technically 5 AM the next day). I made the mentioned addition of arrows after discovering some people didn’t realize you could click on the icon. Here’s a snap of that from the iPhone build on the PC. Cross promotion, now with arrows! I had some friends look at this screen, and got a good reaction from the “love hearts”, so I made a similar change to free version....
Here’s something I hope to start doing more often. Technically, I’ve been hoping to actually start all year. Short development video logs. Today’s video is a demonstration of the cross promotion features in Smiles Zen and Smiles Drop. Inspiration hit last night, and I added something amusing to it I’d thought I’d share. Both builds should go out tonight. I’ll be adding a pair of arrows beside the icon, just so it’s even clearer that you can click on it right here....
Smiles 1.3 is already in the Apple queue, but not Zen and Drop yet. Something “new” in 1.3 is that I removed the “how to play music” instructions from the game. This used to be in the upper right corner of the screen. The description used to say you could “double tap” the home button to bring up music playback, but it seems that was wrong on the iPhones and 3rd gen iPods....
The first step with Smiles was to up the art resolution. That way, I could cleanly resize to any resolution below 4x the iPhone (1920×1280). Unfortunately, double and quadruple iPhone res are not practical resolutions. Double iPhone will work windowed on most desktop LCD and 720p screens (960×640), and quadruple in a window fits on a 30″ Dell or Apple Cinema display, but we could do better. Also, not all screens are the same shape, but the solution isn’t too difficult....
Alright, I don’t see a reason not to talk about this publicly. So if I’m a good boy, I’ll be walking through my process of up-scaling, converting, and porting Smiles as it happens. Ideally, I’d like to have the game available for all 3 desktop platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux). Quickly, Smiles is an IGF Mobile nominated collection of puzzle games for iPhone. You can learn more about the game at smiles-game....