Category Archives: Mobile

Google+ ANE, our first commercial product

We’re glad to introduce our first commercial product: an ANE for Google+!

We’re big fan of Milkman Games’ ANEs, especially the GoViral one. It enables to share a post on Facebook, Twitter, mail… everywhere? Not really. It’s missing Google+! Thanks to our ANE, you will be able to target the Google+ platform for iOS and Android.

Continue reading Google+ ANE, our first commercial product

Silly Family, being an indie dev

Edit: Apptoonomy is no more. Selling games is even harder than making ones. I only focus on Da Viking Code now as a cross platform developer.

The game.

Hey guys, this blog post is very special for me :
– it’s my hundredth article!
– my first game as an indie dev is out!

100 blog articles
When I started blogging 4 years (already!) ago, I didn’t imagine that someday I’ll reach the hundredth article. I started mostly as an exercice in style, improving my english communication skills and coding different things for sharing (unpretentious). I continued and now when I give a look in the past I’m smiling : I can see my evolution, how I’m better as a programmer, and all the different things I did in 4 years.
Also thanks to this blog I had my first client as a freelancer! I would recommand to any programmer to have a blog and post each month an article (that’s what I’m doing since 3 years) on what he is doing.

Apptoonomy
With some friends we created a new company, Apptoonomy. So does it mean that I’m not anymore a freelancer at Da Viking Code? No way! What does a programmer on his spare time? He is programming. With Apptoonomy we mainly focus on making our own games. Let me introduce the first one!

Silly Family
silly1Silly Family is a familly-fun Puzzle Game! Do you know Suzan? Of course you do! Suzan is my father’s son’s sister’s mother’s mother! Suzan is my grandma!!!

In Silly Family, you train your logic by resolving more and more complicated enigmas about increasingly crazier families! You’ll have to find the family relationship or run through the family tree.

We offer 3 different gameplays, 5 families (maybe more) and crazy designs… not to mention the animations! Also a multiplayer mode to defeat your friend!

Obviously questions are generated dynamically, I wrote the algorithm using (family) trees and recursivity. That was funny especially managing the different languages (the application is currently available in English, French, Spanish and Italian). We’re waiting a little bit for German, it won’t be easy 😉

Being an indie dev
Silly Family is the first (finished and published) game that I made as an indie dev. It’s really a longest process than programming games for clients. A client has to be sure (or at least should) that his game design is strong and developer implementation won’t show design flaws. Otherwise programmer’s bill may be painful. I started to develop Silly Family in October 2013 so six months ago. And obviously we already had a game design document. But so many things changed during its developement. Also you can add the fact that you must be satisfied with your game’s direction, and to still have the will to work on. Anyway, it’s a very interesting experience and it improved my skills as a game designer. We’re already looking forward for the next game!

Technology
Obviously I used my beloved Citrus Engine for making this game and Starling framework. The IPA size (before submitting to Apple) is less than 17Mo! How did we achieve this size? It’s thanks to DragonBones and its awesome .dbswf format. AS3/AIR technology was perfect for making this game!

Belle et Sébastien, fighting Android’s APK 50mb limit

It’s already time for a new app, Belle et Sébastien!

IMG_0067IMG_0068Belle et Sébastien is a famous old french book and there was a TV series. A movie is planned for the end of the year.
In this mobile application, we discover B&S’ world: an album introduce the characters and relates several informations based on elements existing in the movie: Génépi, snow, WWII, wolf, sheeps…
There is also a game, a kind of Where’s Wally?. Through pictures from the movie, you’ve to search hidden characters, animals, objects, etc.

Android’s APK 50mb limit
The development was going great until we had to release the application for Android. The app is 90mb, we wanted to be sure that it could be downloaded via 3G on mobile phone for iOS devices (limited to 100mb). When we uploaded the Android’s APK it fails because of its size: an APK can’t exceed 50mb!
I didn’t know that, what a mess! Quickly, I heard about APK expansion files. Apart form the APK, we’re able to upload two obb files, each file could be up to 2Gb! I can’t understand why Google is limiting APK to 50mb when the final application could be up to 4.05Gb. Anyway, that was the way to go. Note that you can also download yourself a zip and save the its content on disk to be used in your application, but it sounds so much user friendly to have everything downloaded at one time!

The issue finally was: how to use this obb file with AS3/AIR? I discovered this Actionscript Native Extension: Android APK expansion files, and everything worked like a charm!

To generate an obb file (don’t forget to add .obb extension to the file):

./jobb -pn air.com.europaapps.BelleEtSebastien -pv 1 -o /Users/Aymeric/Documents/Workspace/Flash/2013/Europa\ Apps/BelleEtSebastien/obbToUpload/air.com.europaapps.BelleEtSebastien/main.1001001.air.com.europaapps.BelleEtSebastien -d /Users/Aymeric/Documents/Workspace/Flash/2013/Europa\ Apps/BelleEtSebastien/bin/images

More informations there.

Available on iOS and Android, gives Belle et Sébastien a try! Note that translations are coming 😉

Resize icons for mobile apps

There are things which take times, they could easily be automated but there aren’t. One of this task is to generate all the icons for a mobile application. You have to resize the same image into 10 different sizes, for Android and iOS (29, 36, 48, 50, 57, 58, 72, 100, 114, 512, 1024).

Why Apple doesn’t only require an image size of 1024 and automatically generate the smaller picture when the app is exported for the publication? There may be a good reason for that. Anyway, go to this Github and grab the php script to generate app icons for Android & iOS in all requested resolutions.

Now the quick dev story: at first, I thought it was a good small project to get back into some ruby dev. I didn’t practice it since several years ago. So I started with Sparrow’s samples, but quickly I went into library & version nightmare, and I wasn’t able to remember a single line of ruby! So I get back to php very quickly and discover that we may use it with a CLI (why couldn’t we?). It’s very quick & powerful, be ready for some script for renaming 😀

Edit:
Find some scripts for renaming files and delete others one based on a string name: https://github.com/alamboley/AssetsOperations