In our game, there’s a lot of on-screen action that we had to be prepared for — we couldn’t have cumbersome, but necessary, calculations and memory allocation processes drop our frame rate to an unplayable level. We’re shooting for a frame rate of 45 FPS; we’ll be happy with anything between 45 FPS and 60 [...]
Archive for May, 2009
Warp Speed
Posted in Code, Games on May 18, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Find Out Your iPhone App Name!
Posted in Names on May 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Earlier, we talked about some tips and pointers to consider when you’re trying to find the right one-two combo when it comes to your app’s name and icon. For our app here at Alley Labs, the naming process is ongoing; a slow circling pattern around a target that we’ll only know we’ve hit once we’ve [...]
The Unpaid Version
Posted in Games, tagged free, free vs. lite, lite, terminology on May 6, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Free vs. Lite It’s nice that you want to give prospective users an opportunity to test your game without paying, but don’t shoot yourself in the foot with the words you use to convey that fact. The two words most commonly used to notify a user that they are downloading a version of the game [...]
Compression
Posted in Code, tagged compression, data, iPhone on May 6, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
What’d you do to my phone bill?! If your game is going to send data over the network, remember that it’s going to cost your users money to do that. If it costs too much – i.e. if they raise an eyebrow even a bit at the cost – you’re in trouble. To avoid this, [...]
Encryption
Posted in Code on May 6, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
No Peeking Unless you want your high scores boards filled up with bored hackers’ fake data – 20,000 users with high scores of 999,999! – then you’ve got to encrypt any data you send over the network and any date you save on the phone. It’s too easy for hackers to snag this data and [...]
