Core S² Software Solutions

The game:

The game will be a dynamic-location tower-defense and resource collection game based in space. The game plays as a 2D top-down view of space where players start with a single ship that builds buildings over time, which in turn generate ships, which can collect resources, build other ships (defensive), and eventually build-up several bases and armadas!

The goal of the game is to survive a given length of time or to mine-out the game’s area. Simply put: mine, build, survive!

[1] Read the design doc here!

The business:

It will be for-profit: You get the percentage of sales that is the percentage of completed features you delivers. The whole poing here is super fast rapid development, so shoot me an email with what you think!

About the team:

Want to learn more about me? [2] Feel free to browse my work and ask me questions!We already are a team of two developers, a sound-effects artist, and a designer.

I recently game a very impromptu talk at MobileUXCamp in Seattle over the weekend. Though a great experience, I wish I had prepared, then again I had no idea I was going to present until 30 minutes before! The topic was “iOS Development for non-engineers”, which was a quick pseudo-technical introduction of building an iOS application for UX designers: I went over the process of setting up a development environment, then over critical concepts (Objective-C as your development language, how GUI building works in XCode, etc.), and finally went over a few examples.

As always with these last-minute presentations, my real-time examples didn’t work, but I was still able to show a live-video of how building an application, and how UIViews and UIViewControllers are related to *.xib files.

If you are interested, I’ve shared the presentation here on Google Docs. If you have any questions at all, feel free to contact me! Finally, here are a few links that are related to questions asked by attendees.

• Learning C: The basis of the Objective-C language (Book title: “learn c in 24 hours”)
• Apple’s iOS UX standard (formally called “Apple Human Interface Guideline”)
• iOS Developer Documentation (start with “Start Developing iOS Apps Today“)
• Want to learn Objective-C without OSX: GnuStep! I wrote an article on this a while ago, but it is still relavent.

Good luck, and as always: have fun programming!

If you need to bind an integer between 0 and powers of 2 – 1(i.e. 1, 3, 7, 15, 31, etc.), you can use the bit-wise and operator to mask out irrelevant bits rather than apply modulo. The idea is I believe that this is faster to do on a processor than to do the modulo operator / code. It might even be the case that modern C compilers optimize for this! I’m even more curious if the hardware (x86) is smart enough to do this.

Put simply: essentially you take your integer, and apply bit-wise and logic to the number, so that all bits that represent a number higher than your limit are ignored, but yet you retain the relavent bits forming a binary number within your limits. You need to do this with powers of 2 – 1 because those numbers are all “filled” bit representations, so for example 3 is 11, 7 is 111, 15 is 1111.

Examples:

1. Simple / standard approach:
int Bounded = rand() % 256

2. Bit-wise approach:
int Bounded = rand() & 255;

Same end result, but I believe (though without confirmation) that approach #2 is faster. Let me hear your thoughts!

Edit: As a friend just pointed out to me (he is a Comp. Eng. major, in my defense :P), I’m right that this optimization is commonly found in compilers and some processors. Wikipedia has a slightly better explanation on this corner-case optimization!