Napland Games - Blog Posts

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…