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Napland Games - Blog Posts

Adventures in Alternative App Markets

This past month I have been focusing a lot on getting our latest game, Sudoku In Space, on as many app markets as possible. I found this great article on Gamasutra, by Arturs Sosins, detailing his experience and stats for downloads on a variety of Android markets. And I realized we were really missing out on a lot of possible exposure. Unfortunately, our installs have not yet been as many as what Arturs experienced, but his game, Sushi The Fish, is casual-arcade whereas Sudoku In Space is a more niche puzzle game (although we’re trying to push it into the casual…

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Sudoku In Space for a Healthy Mind

Ever since I was young I found myself fascinated with puzzles. Mainly the type of puzzles where you put things in some sort of order. I didn’t really realize how much I enjoy a simple relaxing puzzle until I finished making Sudoku In Space and started playing it. It has also made me realize my love of puzzles and why I’m gravitating toward making puzzle games. Puzzles can be frustrating, but at the same time they can be relaxing. Once you get the hang of how to do a puzzle it can provide a meditative experience. Sudoku is a great…

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Asynchronous Animations

Check out the full AGK Newsletter here The more animation and movement you have in your games, the more flashy and appealing they can be to players. In this tutorial I’ll be showing you how to build animations that run in their own self-contained functions. This allows them to be interrupted at any time, allows for simultaneous user input and anything else you wish to occur in your game loop without having to wait for the animation script to finish. In our most recent game, Sudoku In Space, we make extensive use of this for background animations, main menu animations,…

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Loading Animations and Staggering Asset Creation

Original article in the TGC Newsletter can be viewed here. In our last game, Shape Time, I ended up deciding to load quite a few assets at launch time. I implemented a loading animation, but it seemed to actually slow down the loading process a bit. In our next game I wanted to optimize this as much as possible to improve loading time. The reason the loading animation was affecting the speed of loading assets was that I was calling Sync() as frequently as possible so that the animation would update. Here’s an example how it was done (the loading…

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App usage analytics and a postmortem of Shape Time

Originally published in the TGC Newsletter – July 1, 2014 App usage analytics and a postmortem of Shape Time So, you’ve got what you think is a great idea for a game. You’ve put it together, people on your development team and beta testers have enjoyed it. Other than a simple download count, how do you know if others are enjoying it (or not)? Players don’t often leave feedback unless they really like or really dislike your game. So how do we get information about the majority of people playing our game? Are people playing 10 levels and then hitting…

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AGK Tutorial – App Data

Originally published in the TGC Newsletter – June 1, 2014 The question of transferring data from your mobile app to a server was brought up by Parry on the AGK forums and I thought I’d share my process for getting app data from a device. The problem is that Android and iOS put app data in a protected folder on the device. If you want to root or jailbreak the device it is easy to get at, but this process can be dangerous and complex. If you just need a peek at your app’s data then there is an easier way: add…

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AGK Tutorial – Online High Score System

Originally published in the TGC Newsletter – April, 2014 In concert with the current competition to make an addictive game, we thought it might be a good idea to show how to set up an online scoring system. This tutorial will make use of AGK Tier 1 BASIC, PHP, and MySQL. You will need access to a server with PHP and MySQL capabilities. To start, if you don’t already have a server set up, you can install XAMPP (www.apachefriends.org) to your local PC. This could be used as your server, but you will need to allow access to outside networks…

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The Making of a Word Game

Originally published in the TGC Newsletter March 2014 There are many grid-based word games on the market at present, with other popular titles such as Words With Friends,Word Feud, Wordz Up and many more. Sean Mann of Napland Games gives us an insight on the makings of such an application. Word lists All word games need a qualified word list. There are many free lists out there and the best public domain list is ENABLE (Enhanced North American Benchmark LExicon) available from the Google Project site. This list contains some 170,000 words and is widely accepted as one of the best.…

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Preparing for Game 2 – Learning PHP and MySQL

In order for my next game to be able to save user data and transfer data for turns and chat I’ll need to set up a server and learn how to get data on and off it vial simple HTTP commands. I began my adventure today and will chronicle what I’ve done so others can easily set up a test system. I feel that what I’m trying to do is so basic (send data to be written to a database and retrieve that data) First thing’s first, set up Apache Server. This was pretty easy: download the ZIP for Apache…

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