Developing Workflows in Group Side Projects

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In 2019, when my friends and I found ourselves with extra free time, we decided to invest the time into making something that we could all enjoy. After sharing our interests and brainstorming ideas, ten of us decided to work together to create a video game. However, the time and effort needed to create a game far exceed the time and effort it takes to play it. In this blog post, I will use our video game creation to highlight the processes we utilized to stay organized and make our vision a reality.

What is Mixed Reality?

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To understand the answer you must first understand the question… Really we should first take a look at what might be considered the base technologies in the “realities” world. Before the the term, Mixed Reality, came up in what some assume might have been concocted in a marketing meeting we primarily talked about two other technologies.

A Brief Introduction to Game Theory

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Game Theory is a field shared by math and economics that aims to describe strategies and outcomes of games. A game is simply a set of possible decisions and their outcomes. While Game Theory is immediately applicable to certain board games (Tic-Tac-Toe and Chess among others), its usefulness goes far beyond into areas such as public policy and business strategy.

Prototyping with P5

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When I wanted to create a proof of a concept project for one of the game ideas I had, I found many tools and gaming frameworks. However, most of them had a steep learning curve which required a significant time investment before the game could be played. Then I discovered P5, a Javascript library inspired by the Processing language, which made it very easy to get started.

Objective-C…it’s not you…it’s Swift

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At the lastest Apple WWDC conference, Apple decided to suprise it’s developers with introducing a brand new language called Swift which will be used going forward in development all Mac and iOS applications. The good news for all Apple developers is that it is totally integratable with all existing Objective-C code. Another great positive for developers is that it also runs on the current version of iOS, iOS-7. Developers will still need to wait for Xcode-6 to come out of Beta before they can submit full Swift apps, but they will not require everyone to be running the latest iOS.

Whobert Needs Your Help

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Here's Whobert!

Who Am I?It seems Whobert has a bit of a problem; he can’t remember a thing.

Okay, so he’s a wizard.  That much is clear: hat, beard, robe… we’ve got that part.  But there are so many questions!  Where did he come from?  How does he know magic?  Why is there an owl on his head?  Nobody knows. And Whobert can’t remember!

Memory Management for Unity iOS

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Developing a game intended for multiple end platforms can present some unique challenges to consider.  For one, the differing pixel resolutions on apple devices over the years necessitate at least some different background images and layouts to accommodate the different aspect ratios.  My initial technique to deal with this problem was to include a copy of each background for each device present in its scene, with its rendering switched off. 

Announcing Flipout! 2.0!

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Flipout! Logo

I am very pleased to announce a major update to Grio’s memory matching game:  Flipout!

Flipout! is a game of luck and skill where you need to match pairs of cards… similar to the game of Concentration.  We throw a few twists at you, however, to add to the challenge.  What if suddenly the cards decided to up and swap themselves?  Can you keep track of entire rows moving as one?  And just when you thought you had a handle on things, one of the cards explodes, scrambling all of the cards around it!