http://greenpois0n.com/?p=324

The GreenPois0n team has just announced Absinthe 2.0 allowing users of all iDevices (except Apple TV 3) to jailbreak iOS 5.1.1. This is especially good news for me as I can now continue development on my jailbroken app for the inPulse watch, iOS notifier. 

http://www.becausewemay.com/ios.html

We believe that developers should have the freedom to price their games how they like, without interference from the online stores that sell the games. Why? Because it allows us to promote our games more freely, as we are doing here! We rely on the ability to promote our games for our livelihood and control over pricing is an important tool for this purpose.

Because We May is doing something very incredible here. They are a website to help you promote your game by listing it on sale. Any developer can submit their game(s) as long as they put it on sale for the given duration (May 24-June 1). There are currently some amazing games on sale including Osmos, Super Brothers, World Of Goo HD, and more.

[Games Link]

[Submission Link]

I mentioned this on Twitter last week, so I might as well post it here to make it more official. My talk Making Your Games More Dynamic With Lua Scripting was accepted for 360iDev 2012! This will be my first official speaking engagement and I could not be more excited/nervous.

The Talk

I have had a huge interest in lua for some time now, especially as it applies to scripting games.  In my last project, Pocket MUD Pro, I even embedded lua 5.1 and created my own bridge in order to allow players to fully script the gameplay.  This got me very excited for the future as it was so easy to get lua up and running.

My talk will cover the basics of setting lua up in your own iOS projects.  I will be using a simple tile based RPG (written in Cocos2D) for the demo and will demonstrate how you might use lua to script the behaviors of the NPCs as well as dynamically add new ones to the game.  This opens up a whole world of possibility as you can now ship code over the wire and modify your game content without ever submitting an update to Apple.

It appears my talk has some pretty steep competition in its timeslot. There are two other incredible talks going on at the same time, so I’m starting to campaign for it now :)

Please comment on this post if you plan on attending 360iDev.  I would love to connect with you.

[360 iDev Schedule]

http://observer.com/2012/05/23/facebook-is-people-why-i-quit-mark-zuckerbergs-online-collective-data-farm/?show=all

This is a very well written article detailing some of the inner workings of Facebook and why its business is YOU.  

Also, here are 10 promo codes for anyone who wants a free copy.  Please comment on which code you take so others know which one’s are available.

http://higherorderfun.com/blog/2012/05/20/the-guide-to-implementing-2d-platformers/

http://higherorderfun.com/blog/2012/05/20/the-guide-to-implementing-2d-platformers/

http://www.metawatch.org/blog/2012/05/announcing-bluetooth-4.0-dev-system.html

For those of you who have followed my blog for a while, you know that I am a huge geek for smart watches. I had the first version of what is now the Pebble (inPulse) and even hacked a jailbroken iOS app to interface with it.

MetaWatch has been around for quite some time now and looks ok , however their latest update appears to be completely in response to Allerta’s announcement/success of Pebble.

“We are delighted to be the first company to ship a Bluetooth 4.0 smartwatch compatible with both iPhone and Android platforms”

What is really concerning is the fact they they don’t mention anything related to how they are achieving iOS notifications.  Pebble has been very upfront in stating that they are planning on leveraging ifttt.com to deliver complex notifications such as Twitter and Facebook.  It leads me to believe they haven’t quite sorted everything out and are jumping to a press release in order to ride the smartwatch train.

http://www.phailed.me/2011/02/learn-lua-the-hard-way-1/

(click the post title)

I have been using lua in my iOS applications for some time now. This tutorial provides a great introduction to a scripting language that most developers are very curious about. I really suggest spending a few minutes checking it out.

A while back, my buddy seantron showed me some of his 3D games he’d been working on including this one. My initial reaction was “how the heck did he get the chopps to do that?”. While, Sean is an incredible developer with a ton of creativity, doing things like loading models, texture mapping, or even basic 3D projects are flippin hard.

A while back I tried my hand at 3D and made sort of a basic Minecraft style game from scratch using OpenGL ES. Let me tell you, it was brutal (and I have been coding for almost 10 years). This project took me a week or so to ramp up, get basic cubes and textures going and a simple first person view.

Enter Unity

Sean had mentioned to me that he used this 3D engine called Unity to create his games. While I had tried XNA, I had never heard of Unity and figured it was similar (basically a framework with some convenience methods for loading models, mapping, etc…). Boy was I wrong…

Unity 3D is more than just an engine. It is an application that allows even the most novice of developers to create beautiful, rich, 3D games. I’m serious. Check out this demo below of an app I made in unity in about 3 hours using this tutorial. The crazy part is, I wrote almost no code. Much of the interactions and game were developed using drag and drop and free assets.

Link to my awesome game

Getting Started

I was very reluctant to learn Unity at first as the interface appears to be a bit daunting. However, once you check out a few tutorials, it becomes second nature. Here are a few places to get started:

InfinitAmmo’s Unity 3D tutorial series – This was where I first began. He does a great job at going over the basics of Unity while keeping things interesting.

Getting Started With Unity on Active Tuts+ – This is where I made the game you checked out above. Take an hour and do the first in the series, you will be very surprised with the outcome.

Unity 3D tutorials – Unity has a wealth of information and demo projects on their website. They come with the source and comprehensive PDFs detailing various aspects of each of their demo games.

After completing at least the top two series’, you should have enough knowledge to begin hacking on a game of your own. I know that I do :)

Conclusion

I hope this has been enlightening and I really urge you to check out Unity.

Happing Coding!

Unity 3D’s Website

This post is part of iDevBlogADay, a group of indie iOS development blogs featuring two posts per day. You can keep up with iDevBlogADay through the web site, RSS feed, or Twitter.

OK, so the title isn’t entirely true (I have maintained quite a few blogs in my day). But, one thing is for sure, I have sucked at blogging lately. So much so, I just had to think hard about having to bold lately using markdown in the previous sentence #meta.

Burnout

I was blogging very consistently for the Envato Network on their Mobile Tuts Plus as well as on iCodeBlog and here. Eventually, I got burnt out and gave up blogging on every blog (for the month).

What happened was, I was blogging to make money (Envato pays $250/post!) and no longer for fun. This sucks and I was missing deadlines and writing crappy content which needed much revision.

New Plan

Write here only (for fun!) and infrequently on icode if time permits as I can do that during work time ;) That being said, expect to see more content here for better or worse. Once a week is the new goal.

Shutup

That’s what you are saying to me. I hate these “Sorry I haven’t been around in a while. I promise to post more” posts that are usually the last posts on a blog for like 5 years just as much as you do. Let’s hope that’s not the case here. You will just have to trust me and subscribe.

Also, I have a sweet new theme from Jekyll Bootstrap.