Category Archives: Profile

The story continues

Profile

Happy new year!!

We’re already in 2016, it’s incredible how fast time is flying. 2015 was a really good year for Da Viking Code: we worked on a big & challenging game (A Blind Legend made with Unity), several WebGL games (using Pixi & Phaser) and of course some AIR apps & making ANEs, + tons of R&D (Scaleform, Xamarin, Virtual Reality with Cardboards…).

Tamsen is working with me for almost 2 years, and thanks to his awesome works he pushed Da Viking Code to the next steps. So it was about time to update our wesbsite, right? I’m glad to introduce the new website of Da Viking Code (mobile compatibility coming soon)!

This blog was created in 2010 (6 years ago!!), I blogged all my experiences & professional works and so Tamsen started to write his first blog posts here. It was also time to create a professional blog too, right? So the journey will continue on Da Viking Code’s blog. The first article (written by Thomas!) is also our first 3D commercial project, made with love for Heineken.

So this blog will be in standby mode for a while, be sure to update your bookmark!

Psst, did I mention that a new crazy coder joined us? His name is Valentin, he is a multimedia engineer specialized with Unity, 3D and Virtual Reality! He has also some good skills for making nice web stuff!

Thus Da Viking Code evolves as a cross-platform development studio! And this is only the begin!

Back for one week at Gobelins’ school!

Profile, Unity

Next week, I go to Annecy (one of the most beautiful city) at Gobelins‘ school. It’s with a great pride that I’ll come back to my latest school during one week for teaching an introduction to Unity!

During those days, I will present C#, Unity2D, Unity3D and the new Unity UI system. You can find the course online (french only).

I can’t wait to see the talented developers in this promotion! That will be really fun.

Silly Family, being an indie dev

AIR, AS3, Citrus Engine, Flash, Games, Mobile, Profile, Starling, , , ,

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!

Da Viking Code, one year of freelancing!

Profile

Hey guys, happy new year (better late than never!)!!

We’re already in 2014… and now I worked more than one year as a freelancer and it’s still awesome! I’ve detailed most of the projects made on this blog and my personnal website. Give them a look!

So what is coming up?
Now, I’ve a company name, Da Viking Code (you probably got the joke), and a new website! Thank you my friends at Curious Label for this awesome logo & design!

An other very exciting news: Tamsen aka Gsynuh joins me on Da Viking Code’s crew in February!! He’s the best Citrus Engine’s contributor and it will be awesome to work together daily at the same place!

So now we’re two freelancers for your services, playing with AS3/AIR, Unity and Canvas/WebGL technologies!

Best wishes for 2014 and see you between two lines of code!

First month as a freelancer completed!

Profile

Hey guys,

This month was simply awesome! I’ve worked on some cool exciting projects using mostly AS3 with Starling, and the new ones in the pipeline are even better 🙂 I wish I could clone myself to work on all of them! I’d time to improve the Citrus Engine, give a first try to Cocos2D (loved to redo some Objective-C, but I’ll stay on Sparrow, a project using it is coming!) and started to learn Unity3D (you can make quickly some 2D games using Orthello framework). Learning Unity is very exciting, it’s definitely one of future tool I will mostly used in the future.

During this month there was the Global Game Jam. With some great guys, we made a game which won the local jury award using the Citrus Engine:

First achievements are unlocked 😉

See you later!

Becoming a freelancer

Profile

Hi! Since the new Citrus Engine website, this blog was in stand-by during the last two months. This year I worked really hard, using my personnal time, on the Citrus Engine which is the most advanced Open-Source & free AS3 game engine. This work and its support aren’t finished.

Now I’m happy to share with you some exciting news: in January, I will start my career as a freelancer! Thanks to this status, I will be able to work with companies on strong games using the Citrus Engine and make it even more professional. Take a look on its support page.

Will I only make games using this engine? No, diversity is stimulating. I’ve just bought an iMac to be able to re-do some Objective-C, and develop on iOS using Haxe NME.

To sum-up, I will focus on games, mobile applications, and maybe some websites using AS3, Haxe, Objective-C, HTML5 and PHP programming languages. In a long run I hope to improve my Unity3D knowledge, and in a short period I will give Cocos2D a try.

Also I will try to keep this blog alive, making one article by month which won’t be related to the Citrus Engine.

Future is exciting. Feel free to contact me!

New portfolio online

AngularJS, JavaScript, JQuery, KineticJS, Profile, , ,

Before starting to seek a new job, preferably at Lyon (France), it was about time to make a new portfolio! This last two years, I worked a lot with Flash, Php and Objective-C. I wasn’t up to date on the last web tools, so I decided to make my new portfolio in HTML5/CSS3 and try some new tools!

I’ve used the HTML5 Boilerplate as a template to start, resetting CSS style and offering a strong HTML5 base page. Then I gave AngularJS a try. It’s a JavaScript MVC framework powered by Google, very powerful. For the background, I used the canvas tag. At first, I started code it from scratch but there was an opportunity to test an other framework : KineticJS. It’s very easy to handle coming with a Flash background. I’ve also give a try to the new GreenSock Animation Platform which handles TweenLite/TweenMax for JavaScript! And finally using Signals in JavaScript.

The “classic” web has greatly evolved this last years, that was cool to play with those new features/tools!

Tribus, Graduation Project

Chipmunk, Games, iOS, Objective-C, Physics, Profile, Programming, Sparrow, , , ,

On Wednesday 20 th, I made my last orals for school. Some weeks ago, I’ve finished my training at Swad‘s web agency in Annecy. Since Wednesday my sandwich course at Gobelins school (Annecy) is finished, and now I’m in “holiday”. It means that I’m working on my new Portfolio and looking for a job probably at Lyon, France 😉

Let me introduce Tribus, the first game which use bus public transportation as gamification!
We were 4 people behind this project, Pauline the Graphic Designer, Coraline the Designer, Lory the Project Manager / Developer and me as the lead Developer.
Tribus is based on a simple observation : public transportation are boring time for many people. The idea was to play in real time with the bus public transportation and break the boredom thanks to the Gamification.
The Tribus’ concept is to gamify the bus route using its own elements : location, speed, line, bus stop… and offer a game!

The concept was there, but what type of game offer? A real time massive multi-players space opera? Impossible for a small team in 4 – 6 months, we aren’t Electronic Arts. A survival game with zombies? I loved this idea, it could have been awesome if we have worked on subway : safe point, network lost… all the ingredients were already present. However we wanted a game for everyone : fun, easy to play, stress-free… yep, one more casual game.

Tribus is a Canabalt type of game, it is close to Jetpack Joyride. But how are bus elements injected in the gameplay?
It is very difficult to have information on the bus, bus’ companies don’t disclose these informations. So we used the smartphone’s GPS. Thanks to it we could know our position and so the bus one. We have located bus stop in a database and so we knew if a user follow the bus route and then suppose that he is using the bus! The GPS is also used to know the bus speed and thus change the speed of the game.

We developed for iPhone, using Chipmunk and Sparrow for the game (not the app interface) and made a simple port of the Citrus Engine. Since this is my first project using Objective-C the port is not very “user friendly” and it can be improved a lot. Anyway, that was a very rewarding experience.
All the source code is available on GitHub.

A short video :

Screenshots :