The story

It's a start of the story that lies in the base of our future game. It was hard to write it, and even harder to translate. Maybe it will be interesting to someone, so I decided to post it. Enjoy.

 

Introduction

 

Autumn has come to the Craftstown, and by the custom of local artisans it was a time for the next festival of crafts. Autumn is a time when leaves go from yellow to green, and masters of paint business compete  for the title of the best artist. Whole year every family of artists are hiding the secrets of their success, and showing them only on the contest, to earn some privileges and respect of fellow villagers.

Over the last decades the Brushhands - family of painters, are holding the glory of the victory. Old aged man Thomas Brushhand is the head of the family, and a respected member of the town. For him the time came to transmit the secrets of his skills to his lazybone grandson Robert.

 

(Thomas): “Bobby, this year you will participate in the festival as a representative of our family.  I hope you won’t let anyone take away our glory. Painting – is not just our bread and a place in this glorious town, it’s our mission, our pride and a basis of our respect. For many years I was the best of all painters, but apparently years are my main opponent and I can’t overcome them. My hands are not the same, and my eyes see badly. I know that you're a good boy, Bobby, and you have an unusual team, so I think this year you will be able to surprise our rivals. You have a little more than a week until the holidays. Bring your team, you'll have to talk to them, you should prepare seriously!”

(Robert): "I even don’t know if I can!"

 

Bobbys team meeting

 

(Edward, fat guy): “You must be crazy, if you believe in your grandfathers words! He had never let the brush out of his hands, and non of us can paint even the stupid fence in a good way. What were you thinking about, Bob??”

(Robert): “My grandfather was always a good example for me, I can’t dissapoint him.”

(Edward): “And that’s why you’ve decided to be disgraced? They all will laugh at us!”

(Emilly): “Stop weeping fatty, you not a little boy any more. Lets better think how we will prepare for the contest? In fact it’s our future, so it’s useless to run from it.”

(Edward): “And what do you propose?”

(Oliver, young artist): “We can ask Mr. Thomas about the secrets of his success. Everyone saying that in his young years he was as lazy as Bobby now, but that didn’t prevent him from being successful, win the contest for a couple of years, and educate such a good people as Bobbys mother and father.”

(Emilly): “That might work. My granny always says that there’s no better thing than a good advice from a wise man.”

 

The story of Thomas Brushhand

 

(Thomas): “I see you are slightly confused. There’s not much time, but I’ll try to help you. But first, I’ll tell you the story, that made me a real master from a real lazybone like you. It was  long long ago …”

 

And grandfather told about mysterious paint that he got when he was young. By painting any door with that paint you could go to another world, similar to our, but with completely different laws and rules. He told that somewhere there, there’s a magic brush, that can make anyone who will possess it, a real master. By his words that brush was the secret of his success.

(Thomas): “That days I called it the “World of doors”. Unusual, doesn’t it? It’s a strange name, but an odd world has to have a strange name. Moreover, the essence of that world, apparently connected with doors.”

(Robert): “How did it happen that the brush is gone now? And why do you think that it’s gone back to that world?”

(Grandfather): “Hm-hm. Every skill is a capricious thing, you’ve got it while you’re working on it. It has something in common with that brush. You are a master of you skill while you are the one with it, but when you leaving it for some time, it vanishes from our world and goes back to its world.”

(Robert): “So, everything we need is to get to that odd world, get the brush and win the contest?”

(Grandfather): “Don’t think that it’s so easy. You’ll have to work hard with your hands and with your brain to find it. You’ll understand what I’m talking about once you’re in that world.”

 

(Roberts team perplexedly looking at each other.)

 

(Grandfather): “Don’t worry Robert! With such team, you have nothing to be afraid of, I believe that you’ll handle everything. But there’s one thing I have to warn you all about. I have only a small amount of paint. To get back to our world you’ll have to collect enough similar paint there. And one more thing. I present you my diary. You will find a lot of interesting things in it. I hope it will help all of you, kids.”

(Robert): “Thanks, grandfather.”

(Grandfather): “Let’s go. I’ll show you the way.”

 

(Grandfather takes children to the corner of his room, and repaints the old door with the last magic paint that he has.)

 

(Grandfather): “Before stepping into the doorway, grab each other by the hand.”

(Team): “Ok”

(Grandfather): “Have a safe trip.”

(Says grandfather and opens the door.)

 

Robert closed his eyes, took a deep breath and stepped over the threshold.

 

Kabooooooom!!!!

 

First sight

 

(Emilly): “Where are we? And where we go now?”

(Robert): “Cheer up! I can’t see you’re smiling! Let’s read the diary, it can help us.”

(Robert opens the diary and every member of the team can see the map.)

(Edward): “It’s only a first page and I’m feeling much much better.”

(Emilly): “This diary is a useful thing.”

(Oliver): “You are right but this map has too much places drawn on it. We don’t know where to find the brush.”

(Robert): “Yes, you are right. It’s a problem. What will we do now? Where will we go? We can’t just guess. It’ll take too much time and we have only a week.”

(Emilly): “Stop it. I have an idea. Lets split. You Eddie will go here, the map says it’s not very far from here. Oliver you will go here (Emilly points her finger). Bobby you’ve go to this nice little village, and I’ll see what’s here. We have a week before the contest, lets manage our time rationally. We will gather on this crossroad in three days. Everyone understood?”

 

(Everyone is watching the map and murmuring something.)

(Team): “Ok.”

 

(Emilly): “Ok! So, let’s go!”



Renaming your XCode project

Hi, everyone!

As we've changed our course slightly, I had to either create a new project or reuse existing one. I've decided not to waste time and reuse existing one. But faced some problems. Renaming a project in XCode is not as easy as it could be.

You have to walk a bunch of steps, to rename your project:

  • Rename your .xcodeproj file and open it in XCode.
  • Rename your -Info.plist from XCode.
  • Rename your _Prefix.pch from Xcode.
  • Rename your AppDelegate.h and AppDelegate.m from XCode.
  • Change your AppDelegate.h @interface name correspondingly.
  • Change your AppDelegate.m @implementation.
This things was almost obvious, and now the tricky ones:
  • Rename your main target in Targets tree.
  • Open every .xib files you use and check class names for everything. Especially in Main Window .xib file where your AppDelegate is mentioned.
  • Right click on main target in Targets tree. And go to Get Info. Type .pch in search box and change the name of linked .pch file in "GCC_PREFIX_HEADER". Clear search field and type .plist there. Now change .plist file in "Info.plist File" under "Packaging" category. And the most significant one change "Product Name" under "Packaging".

That's all you have to do to rename your Xcode project. At least I hope I haven't forgot something. :-)

Cheers!

Changing our course

Hi everyone!

While developing our "big" game, we've decided that it's too hard, to make it good enough without any experience. Now we are struggling with game plot, story, characters and graphics. Alexej is working hard, but we can't focus on a big game right now. And one more thing, we have a slightly strange tax laws, and I'm trying to solve this issues. As soon as we will solve our problems, we will be back with our "big" game, but for now we've decided to develop something less complex.

It would be a word type game for children mainly. There will be no complex graphics, but I hope that it will be very cool. We haven't decided yet the question with the price, maybe it will be free, but maybe the price will be the lowest available in the appstore.

I hope that we will solve our problems. And keep following us if you following, and welcome if not. =)) Don't forget to use twitter.

Cheers!

Debugging memory management problems with NSZombieEnabled

Recently had an EXEC_BAD_ACCES issue, so decided to google, to find what people do in such cases, and found NSZombieEnabled. This thing is great. It helps very much. iPhone development guide says:

To activate the NSZombieEnabled facility in your application: Choose Project > Edit Active Executable to open the executable Info window. Click Arguments. Click the add (+) button in the “Variables to be set in the environment” section. Enter NSZombieEnabled in the Name column and YES in the Value column. Make sure that the checkmark for the NSZombieEnabled entry is selected.

and that's all you have to do. When this variable is set to YES, and you're trying to dealloc anything, runtime changes it's class name to _NSZombie dynamically and memory is not marked as free. So you have something like a repository of deallocated objects, and _NSZombie is watching for all dealocated objects. Everytime you're trying to send a message to a Zombie your console is populated with new message like this:

2009-12-27 11:41:22.476 App[1982:20b] *** -[CFString compare:]: message sent to deallocated instance 0x3da1e30

and it's quit descriptive as you can see. So from now I'll use this feature wherever needed. It's cool.

...

Introduction.

Hello everyone!

Now we are ready for an initial post, about the game we're developing. Since the AppStore is crowded with all types of games, mostly puzzle type games, we've decided not to develop a puzzle game. Insted it will be a platformer. ...

Ok. So from now we're blogging.

I think it would be polite, to start from saying "Hi everyone! Glad to see you here."

So, Hi everyone! Glad to see you here. =)

My friend Alexej and I always wanted to start blogging. =) And now we have a reason to start. We decided to start developing a game for an iPhone. No jokes.

Now you can say: "You're so predictable. Today everyone is developing a game for an iPhone." ...

 
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