From the kitchen

This week we interviewed with Phong, co-founder of a Vietnamese game company Guava7. Below read our hard questions and his most honest answers. Please tell us about yourself, your company and how you got into mobile application development My name's Thai Thanh Phong (call me Phong for short, note: Vietnamese naming order is "Family Name - Middle Name - Name" :) My career in game development started about 7 years ago when I joined Gameloft's Vietnam studio as a J2ME porting programmer. During the time there, I was working at different positions such as porting programmer, creation programmer,...

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Hello Giderosians! This blog post is about our roadmap/SoW of Gideros Studio for second half of 2012. While it doesn't include a commitment, most of the items defined here are based on the real roadmap entries in Gideros Studio bugtracker. Proposed months may change due to workload and other priorities that may take part. In case of a major roadmap modification, we'll let you know about it. Current (major) production release is Gideros Studio 2012.2, and this roadmap assumes this release as a basis. Note that we value your feedback on this document. Please send your comments in Gideros Studio Q &...

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In this blog post we have an interview with James Reynolds, an instructor, Lua lover and mobile development expert. He's developed a course that helps children learn mobile application development in University of Utah, using Gideros Studio. Move on to read this entertaining and informative interview. What's the aim of this course? The goal of this course is to give the attendees the tools to gain or accelerate their ability to program mobile games. The course will teach programming basics, how to make games, and how to put programs on a mobile device. The second goal is to amplify the desire...

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When we started with Gideros Studio, one of our aims was to build a healthy, consistent and sustainable ecosystem around this SDK and IDE. We wanted other applications that could run well with Gideros Studio, including IDEs, (paid and free) plugins, 3rd party level builders, particle engines, physics editors, sound packs and more. The authors of these applications should feel they are a part of Gideros world, and contribute to the community so everybody could benefit from these tools and resources, to leverage their applications. For the last 10 months (since we released our very first version)...

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The biggest update for the last week was Gideros Studio 2012.2.2. This release features iOS In-app Purchase (Store Kit), which you can use in your apps to provide additional premium features, methods to purchase and download new books, or offer new and shiny levels for your game. You can even allow the player to purchase virtual properties. Apart from Store Kit, this version includes lots of Box2d improvements. More than 10 functions added to Gideros Studio, which hasn't been in previous versions. For a list of added Box2D versions, see the release notes. As usual, you can find our Roadmap,...

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Apple has released its third generation tablet, named "the new iPad", contrary to what many have predicted. It features an unparalleled display, with 4X more pixels than the previous model and new iOS 5.1 operating system. Reviews have shown that in terms of CPU power not much have changed. There are other minor (!) additions as well, including faster network connections with 4G LTE, 5 megapixel iSight® camera with advanced optics for capturing amazing photos and 1080p HD video. The 3.1 million pixels in this version are already more than one million more pixels than an HDTV. That is, a normal...

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Gideros Studio was lacking a decent particles engine - until now. Thanks to Gianluca D'Angelo (@gregbug in Gideros forums), developers can now enjoy TNT Particles Engine, an open source, developer-friendly particle engine. A particle engine allows developers to add rich visual effects to their games and applications. It's important for an engine to be fast and lightweight, since particles cannot be used themselves, but inside another screens, which can be full of sprites and bitmaps. Luckily, TNT Particles Engine can show several hundred particles at once, even in slow devices, thanks to the wonderful,...

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We interviewed with Robert Hahn, lead developer of Phalanx, which was just released on iTunes and loved by many people around with its pixel-perfect graphics, very nice artwork, carefully crafted game mechanics and overall usability. Below, Robert explains how he started with Gideros Studio, and why he loved the technology and passion behind it. How did your story start, and what was your initial thoughts? Phalanx is my first published game, but in fact, is my forth iOS project. The first one was an app designed to help medical professionals. It wasn't conceptually difficult – as a web application...

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We just released Gideros Studio 2012.2, and had very positive feedbacks so far. Improved IDE, iOS plugins, high performance graphics engine, complete Android & iOS support and -most importantly- very fast support have been our strong points. Now we're aiming much higher than we achieved, and plan to provide more updates, Android plugins, IDE enhancements, 3rd party application integration and more. Two new games released Giderosians worked hard last week and they released two new games. The first one is from Tabletop Game company, an entity specialized in board games. Their first iPad...

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Last two weeks was real rush for us. We first attended the Casual Connect Conference in Hamburg, and returned back with a long todo list in our pockets. Then we headed to Antalya, where many businesses have met to discuss innovative ideas and new startups, including Gideros Mobile. We were even featured in Wall Street Journal, and several local media. We didn't stop coding in this time frame - our next maintenance release is baking, which will eventually be the basis for our next big release. Gideros Studio now includes SQLite plugin for iOS, where you can store big amounts of data without sacrificing...

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