Posts in Linked

Why Is Candy Crush Saga So Popular?→

Stuart Dredge:

Really, though, if you want to find out why Candy Crush Saga is so popular and makes so much money, you should ask the other people: the ones actually playing it. Mums and dads, aunts and uncles. Grandparents, even. Housewives and househusbands. Commuters from office juniors through to CEOs.

Your non-gamer friends, especially. Even if you’re not quite as aware of how much they’re playing Candy Crush Saga and similar games since you figured out how to turn off their Facebook alerts begging for help. Candy Crush Saga’s audience isn’t just huge: it’s hugely mainstream.

The question is whether King will end up like Zynga or not.

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Dark Game Design→

Tadhg Kelly, writing for Edge:

In the short term, your game’s player numbers may go up and your revenue might explode, but you inevitably sacrifice integrity. You might have onboarded a few players to pay for stuff, but you’re teaching many more to ignore any messages that the game spits out. It becomes harder to communicate with players and you lose their loyalty or the possibility of a game building a unique, defensible culture.

“Integrity” – most tech pundits will tell you that it doesn’t matter when you can monetize free-to-play with behavioral strategies that increase engagement and other meaningless buzzwords.

Luckily, there are exceptions, even on the App Store.

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Facebook’s “Tweaks” For iOS Developers→

Today, Facebook spent $2 billion and open-sourced a library for iOS developers.

Tweaks, available on GitHub, provides an interface for developers to make minor adjustments and tweak parameters of an app directly inside the app, in a few seconds. Those changes can be the color of a button or the speed of an animation, and Facebook says that Tweaks helped them build Paper, the highly praised alternative Facebook app.

Here’s TechCrunch’s Greg Kumparak on Tweaks:

For developers, it means being able to fine-tune applications faster and with less code. As an added bonus, it lets any of their designers who might not love to code help figure out the best settings without having to pop into the source or pester the dev team for a million new builds.

And Facebook, on the project’s page:

Occasionally, it’s perfect the first try. Sometimes, the idea doesn’t work at all. But often, it just needs a few minor adjustments. That last case is where Tweaks fits in. Tweaks makes those small adjustments easy: with no code changes and no computer, you can try out different options and decide which works best.

Some of the most useful parameters to adjust are animation timings, velocity thresholds, colors, and physics constants. At Facebook, we also use tweaks to temporarily disable new features during development. That way, the designers and engineers involved can enable it on just their devices, without getting in the way of others testing the app.

Tweaks looks like a handy solution for developers, designers, and, to an extent, even testers of apps. It’s available here.

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The WSJ Interviews Original iPhone Engineer→

The WSJ’s Daisuke Wakabayashi interviewed Greg Christie, one of the original iPhone engineers, about the creation of the device that launched seven years ago.

In late 2004, Mr. Christie was working on software for Apple’s Macintosh computers when Scott Forstall, a senior member of the company’s software team, walked into his office, closed the door and asked if he wanted to work on a secret project, codenamed “purple.” The team would develop a phone with an integrated music player, operated by a touch screen.

There are some new anecdotes to me in the interview, as well as a photo of a system Apple created to test the iPhone software in 2006 (it’s big and clunky as you imagine). You can read the interview here.

See also: Andy Grignon’s story.

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The Making Of Tengami→

Pocket Gamer’s Lee Bradley posted an interview with Nyamyam, the studio behind the recently released Tengami for iOS, a puzzle/exploration game built as a Japanese pop-up book.

Our goal was never to be the next big indie hit. People look at like Fez and Braid, games that made millions. But that was never our goal. We just wanted to make a game that we love. Something that was very unique and original, something that nobody else has done before.

I didn’t like some of the choices in Tengami 1.0 (puzzles seemed arbitrary; character movement was slow), but I loved the atmosphere and visual representation of different types of folding paper. Tengami was just updated to version 1.1, which introduces an alternative character control, and I’m going to give it another try.

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Codea 2.0→

Codea is an incredible app that allows you to create games and interactive simulations directly on an iPad with graphical assets, sounds, and a full code editor. Codea is built on Lua and it adds various native options for managing resources and functions visually – it’s one of those apps that gives a new meaning to the “post-PC” idea.

Today, Codea 2.0 was released with full iOS 7 and 64-bit support alongside new features that tie in with more aspects of iOS. The app has a location API to access a device’s location, Bluetooth keyboard shortcuts, a new unified asset system, new sound and music functions, and specially commissioned audio packs with music and effects made specifically for the app. The code editor has been completely rewritten with autocomplete, smart indentation, and inline errors; there are dozens of other changes that make game creation on iOS both simpler and more powerful.

I don’t use Codea, but I’ve always been interested because I’m fascinated by the app – to me, it looks like the kind of iOS-only, Pythonista-like breakthrough that’s possible on modern devices and that augments classic programming with native integrations and a touch interface. The new version sounds amazing and it’s only $9.99 on the App Store (free update for old customers).

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Behind Flipboard’s Layout Engine→

Charles Ying, developer at Flipboard:

When you read Flipboard, articles and photographs are laid out in a series of pages you can flip through, just like in a print magazine. Each magazine page layout feels hand-crafted and beautiful — as if editors and designers created it just for you.

We automate the whole process of layout design and editing by slotting your content into custom-designed page layouts — like fitting puzzle pieces together. We start with a set of page layouts created by human designers. Then our layout engine figures out how to best fit your content into these layouts, considering things like page density, pacing, rhythm, image crop and scale. In many ways, that is the key to Flipboard’s signature look and feel: at its heart are the work of real designers.

I’ve always appreciated the way Flipboard presents web articles into magazine-like layouts that, however, also feel “smarter” than print in how they treat images and text flow. It turns out, Flipboard built an entire engine that is capable of combining layout designs with algorithms to determine the best way to display articles depending on multiple variables and filters. Great read.

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Bookmarklet To Open Twitter Profiles In Tweetbot→

Dave Bradford had one of the same problems I deal with on a daily basis:

While using mobile Safari on the iPhone I sometimes come across a Twitter account I’d like to follow or check out, to follow them I have to select the users handle from the URL, open Tweetbot, go to search, then copy the username into the search field.

It’s a minor annoyance, but those few seconds you spend copying and pasting add up over time. Dave made a bookmarklet to open Twitter profile pages as usernames in Tweetbot – it works on OS X too if you remove “mobile.” from the bookmarklet to work with desktop Twitter pages.

Get the code here.

Update: Phillip Gruneich also has a few bookmarklets that look cleaner and work with both Twitter and App.net.

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Behind The Sales Numbers Of Badland→

Brandon Sheffield, writing for Gamasutra:

Frogmind was founded in 2012, by two developers from Trials developer RedLynx. In 2013, they released their first game, Badland, and immediately got 100,000 downloads at $3.99, which was great, but sales took a nose dive after the first weekend, going down to 1,000 downloads per day, and eventually less.

Badland is a fantastic iOS game that’s truly built with touch controls in mind. In Frogmind’s GDC session, CEO Johannes Vourinen shared some interesting numbers that iOS game developers thinking about other platforms (Google Play Store, Amazon Appstore) should take a look at.

Also interesting is his report on temporary sales and Apple’s “Free App of the Week” initiative (which Badland participated in, although during the special App Store anniversary week) – because the game is typically a paid download with no In-App Purchases, the result after the promotion wasn’t what most people think it is.

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