Why Not Just Use Evernote?

I’ve been using Evernote for several years, which is great, the best features to me are:

• Multi devices synchronization
• High quality app on iOS/Android and OSX
• Very good search in notes (even in the photos)

Though lately I found myself write less an less in Evernote, if I’m writing something long, then usually I will use MacVim, may copy the text back to Evernote. If I need to write a couple of line, the process to write in Evernote is like this:

• Switch to Evernote
• Find the note for current day (each day I will have a new note.)
• Go to the end of the note
• Write something
• Switch back

Feels a bit heavy, also there is no information about when I did add the line into the note.

[Read More]

During the days to develop our first game: Day Day Birds, I went through the progress of learning to use Marmalade, generally it’s very easy to use, and save me lot of time, though there are some little things that I hoped that I know earlier.

Stack Size

The game started to crash randomly before I noticed, it’s quite hard to debug, especially without the tools in Xcode or other IDEs provide. And it never crash in the simulator, so the debugging is quite awkward, a lot of guess, build, test-run going on.

When it crashed on iOS device, some information were provided, though full stack trace is not availabe, and the place of crash is not consistent. After 2 or 3 days and nights figihting with this bug, finally found out the root cause, which is very surprising.

[Read More]

The audio and music are playing a very important role in games, for our future games, I want them to have good quality of audio and music, e.g. don’t use short loop of mp3 music, but something much longer and more dynamic without taking much space. My first thought is to use MIDI+soundfonts or some mod-based music, so I spent some time to try to see the possibility. There are quite some libraries to support xm playback, though I can’t find any Marmalade extensions on the web, in the forum someone mentioned that they made use of FMOD in their game, though there is no code shared, and FMOD is quite expansive. [Read More]

In 2D games, it’s typical to use image based font for UI elements, which can provide better graphic result, fast rendering, and usually smaller then true type fonts (especially if you want to support languages with big character set, e.g. Chinese). There are quite some tools to generate such font images, I’m using bmGlyph as the font generator, it can publish the popular “Cocos2d / BMFont” format, though it’s not directly usable in Marmalade. [Read More]

It’s been more than a month since my post about the idea of game engine based on Marmalade and IwGame, after the post, spent many hours busy coding, now I’ve got the basic level editor up running, I think it’s pretty cool, so here are some details about it. Here is a screenshot of the level editor: Level Editor Screen Shot 1 Updates about Original Post Before talking about the level editor, first I want to share some updates about Marmalade and IwGame in the last month. [Read More]

Marmalade provide good support for writing custom shaders in it, though it’s not easy to get all the information to start writing the first shader in my case, here is some information that I gathered during the process. I decided to only support Open GL 2.0 Shaders in our games, most current devices support it, and as a small team, supporting older devices is a bit hard since we don’t have testers for now, also the architect of 2. [Read More]

Since August 2012, 2 developers(including me) and 2 graphic designers come together and started a small game studio to work on some mobile casual games, as the tech lead, I need to choose a development way for our first batch of games. Our games will be mostly 2D games, might with some 3D charactors, though the scenes or levels will be 2D, I think that’s better for the team and the graphic quality of the games. [Read More]

What is PlantUML? PlantUML is a component that allows to quickly write: sequence diagram, use case diagram, class diagram, activity diagram, component diagram, state diagram object diagram I really like the idea of writing UML diagram with plain text. Since it’s totally plaintext, it’s very easy to do diff and version track, also you don’t need to do anything about the layout (the text itself looks pretty good too). [Read More]

What is Movable Write Back in 2010, I already had some experiences on iOS development. Did wrote some very simple application to fetch information over HTTP-RPC to a trac instance, and wrote a very simple game with Cocos2D and Box2D. Did spend some time to catch up with the versions or iOS updates and read about the new APIs. But my feeling was that by only spend small amount of time like it, I can never learn enough to have real experience on it, and I’ve been working on Web development for a few years. [Read More]