So over the weekend we were invited to take part in the Creative Assembly game jam at rezzed Having previously only previously participated in a 48 hour game jam, I was slightly worried about attempting to make a game in just 8 hours.

So when we rocked up to rezzed we were told that the theme for the game jam would be flux with the three diversifiers being liquid, sound and waves. I initially drew a complete blank upon hearing the theme, but luckily my team mate Michael was able to scribble together a game idea.

We decided make a rhythm based game where you had to press a button in time to a rippling wave. After seeing the drawing Jules (my other teammate) said that it looked like it could be based in a pond and soon she had some sketches with frogs in a pond.

So I rapidly began hacking away and after a little while I had an initial prototype.

One of the biggest issues was ensuring that all the music would be kept in time. I created BeatCounter script that would give me callbacks every time the audio played a beat or completed a bar.
At about the 6 hour mark we has our game feature complete, which gave us 2 hours to add polish. This game us time to add particle systems and to make the frogs bop their heads in time with the music (just by listening to the beatcounter callbacks).

On Saturday we had to give a presentation of our game which you can see below. Shortly afterwards we were announced to be the winners, much to our disbelief.

You can check out the awesome music Michael made on soundcloud:

I had an such awesome time at this jam, and I met so many lovely people and saw some really cool games being made. We have now released Toadal war on itch, so feel free to check it out 😀

Please excuse the rushed sentiment of this blog post, but having finished coding our game for Global Game Jam ’16 words are starting to fail me. You can view our game over here:

http://globalgamejam.org/2016/games/dances-elder-gods

So the theme for 2016’s GGJ was that of ritual, so we instantly started thinking of tribal communities worshiping their deity of choice. We started brainstorming in the pub on Friday night. Here are some sketches from then, (it’s surprising how close they are to the finished product).

Initially we were unsure whether to make a straight rhythm game, or opt for a mastermind (board game) style game where you have to guess the correct pattern. Eventually we settled on the later.

So we began development of the game, and I created an early prototype which had some form of dance input.

Michael (@Mikey_PB) then worked on creating all the sfx and music, only sampling his voice to meet the “Loudmouth” GGJ diversifier (which totally worked for our style of game). Jules (@julesRGB) then squirrelled away creating us some art work while Kylie (@TajunShadow) worked creating us some low poly environments. Here are some of Jules’ early sketches:

and by the end of Saturday (!) we had a fairly stable build of our game.

Then on Sunday we put on the finishing touches on the game, adding in new sounds effects and adding the animated monster in the background. Here’s a gif from the final game:

One of the things that I have always found useful when working with task tracking software, is the ability to see a list of all git commits associated with a given issue. Currently commit tracking is only supported for Business class users, and so far only GitHub is supported.
Here I will explain how you can get Git to automatically link your trello cards with your git commits.

1) Firstly, install node and node trello,

sudo npm install -g node-trello

2) Next get an app key from trello using the folowing link: https://trello.com/1/appKey/generate

3) Allow Git-hook to use your account – https://trello.com/1/connect?key=KEY_YOU_OBTAINED_FROM_STEP_TWO&name=git-hook&expiration=never&response_type=token&scope=read,write

4) Unzip the attached ZIP file into your .git directory for your project (this file may be hidden for you). So the path should be your_project_path/.git/hooks

hooks

5) You may need to make the script executeable

chmod +x your_project_path/.git/hooks/*

6) Open the post-to-trello file in the hooks folder and fill in your key, token, repo link, and board id. To get you board ID, go to your trello board in a browser and append “.json” on the end of the URL e.g. https://trello.com/e/aaaaaa/my-board.json

Now anytime you mention a card number in a commit message like this : “#44 Some message”. Your comment should appear on your card. Credit to mashihua for the initial Git -> trello code.

For the last couple of lunchtimes I have been working with my technical director Alan to create a bubble machine that could respond to our social media presence.
Meet Mr P

We brought a kids bubble machine for a couple of quid and modified the switch on top so it was linked by a transistor. This transistor was then enabled and disabled by the GPIO socket on a Raspberry Pi, which we then switched on and off using a simple node.js program.

The Twitter API has two REST callbacks which are were helpful for us to respond to our presence.

Firstly, one call to get the all the retweets of the logged in user
Secondly, one call to get the list of followers

I wrote the program to poll these callbacks every minute and to detect any changes.

Lastly, the program also posts to our company Slack channel, detailing what Mr P is excited about.

Here’s a copy of the source code and here’s a video of the little guy in action.

So TestFlight has been taken down today and rolled into the new iTunes connect service. Unfortunately the new service came with bunch of restrictions that make it pretty much useless for me, including:

• 30 day limit on build beta testing
• 25 user limit for internal builds
• An Apple review required to release to more than 25 users

So what can be done, without requiring testers to fiddle around with iTunes?
Now with the enterprise developer account it is well documented that you can serve IPA files using a URL, but this functionality is also available to normal Apple developer account users, but with a little bit of tinkering.

Firstly create a Ad-Hoc IPA that you would normally upload to Testflight.
Next you will need to generate a manifest for your IPA (this used to be done for you, but the feature has been removed from Xcode 6). Here’s a copy of the template that I use to populate mine:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
   <key>items</key>
      <array>
         <dict>
            <key>assets</key>
            <array>
               <dict>
                  <key>kind</key>
                  <string>software-package</string>
                  <key>url</key>
                  <string>REPLACE_URL</string>
               </dict>
            </array>
            <key>metadata</key>
            <dict>
               <key>bundle-identifier</key>
               <string>REPLACE_BUNDLE_ID</string>
               <key>bundle-version</key>
               <string>REPLACE_BUILD_VERSION</string>
               <key>kind</key>
               <string>software</string>
               <key>title</key>
               <string>REPLACE_APP_NAME</string>
            </dict>
         </dict>
   </array>
</dict>
</plist>

Replace the strings, and use the URL that your IPA will be hosted at (this address does not need to be https).
You will then need to upload this manifest file to a server which is uses https. I ended up using a Amazon S3 bucket as they are currently offering a year free trial for new users. If the manifest file is not on a server which uses https, the download will not work on iOS 7+ devices.
Once you are hosting both the Manifest file, and uploaded your IPA, you should be able to download your IPA onto a device using the following link:

itms-services://?action=download-manifest&url=https://REPLACE_MANIFEST_URL

this link can then me emailed or on a webpage, and will allow any user in your provisioning profile to download your app directly on their iOS device.

While developing Super Jump Golf I have been playing around with some of the existing games developers have produced using Cocos2D. One of the features that consistently stick out on my mind when playing most of the games is the difference a unique font can bring to the game.

Using bitmap fonts can also potentially improve load times over true type font, since the bitmap images won’t have to be generated at runtime.

Cocos2D supports bitmap fonts in in the form of a .fnt file and a bitmap font atlas. There are free tools avalible, such as Heiro (OSX) and BMFont (Windows), which will create these files for you, but will require the true type font (.ttf) to be previously installed on your system. Once you have created the true type font you can always use it later for promotion material for the game. So how do you create a True Type Font?

One option is to use Inkscape, an open source vector graphics program. Inkscape can simply import your bitmap images, trace the bitmap to make a vector (saleable) image and assign the selected graphic to a desired character. One of the downsides of the new SVG font editor however is that there isn’t currently any way to create fonts which aren’t fixed spaced. If you’re intending to create a mono-spaced font then this is by far the easiest solution to creating a font. You can find a tutorial on creating a webdings font using inkspace here.

The next option, and the option I ended up choosing is to create a font using a program such as Font creator. Font creator provides a simple interface and editor to allow you to change the spacing between each character.

While the process can be quite time consuming, it can be significantly reduced by first creating a vector image trace using Inkscape and importing the postscript (.eps) file into Font Creator (the bitmap image tracer that comes with Font Creator didn’t work too nicely with my character set).

Once you have saved and installed the font, just load up Heiro or BMFont and you should be good to go. Another bonus of creating a TTF file is that you won’t have to resize your bitmap image for each size font that you need for your game, since the TTF can simply resized and a new font file generated.