My Work

I've missed the last pyweek because of some prior commitments but this time iv'e managed to register for it in time and have actually been able to finish it. Im' not sure if i was aiming low or if i just got better at making games (simple ones' ofcourse). But it took surprisingly less time than it used to. For starters i have used cocos library instead of writing all the update cycles and rendering functions. This made adding effects to the game very easy. The fact that i've been working with cocos2d-x at work has helped me feel comfortable using cocos in python. I have toyed with using this library before but didn't see the need for it.. I was wrong .. i have been able to accomplish more than i could have if i stuck with writing my own effects etc. The other thing is the discovery of the method to make any normal image into a pixelated image. Gimp has this as part of blur menu options in Filters menu. This was really handy in creating the icons for the p...

I have been trying to create cute characters so that i could one day make my own cute looking casual game. ive' equated drawing cute characters to drawing chibi characters. So i looked up to my guide .. I've been following the above artist for a couple of months now, i've been trying to understand the basics so i can make game art myself. So here is what iv'e been able to achieve. Hope you like these. :) i've been too lazy to digitize them. May be i should start drawing these on the tablet rather than in a book.

Cocos2d-x is awesome because you can use cocosbuilder for creating scenes / animations with ease. But there could be scenarios where you want to create multiple CCB (cocosbuilder files) like 1) Same animation but different images      You might want to create a large number of ccb files with different images but same animations. This could be done in the code as well but this would make it easier. 2)  Create a starting point for animation.     If you had to move the images around in the ccb but you know for sure that all the images have to be dragged into the scene and animated. So how do we do this?... Well the "CCB" files are nothing but XML files to be more precise they are PLIST  files. So all you have to do is create these XML files using a script of some sort so your manual labour is reduced. Python was the language of choice here because it's very versatile at doing things like these. I was going to use the xml Etree module for hand...

The Qt5.2.0 is adding support for android and i couldn't be more excited. After fiddling around with the basic Qt based stuff, i realized that the QtQuick is the way to go for making interfaces for the mobile devices. The tutorial video about getting started with QtQuick is a good start for getting acquainted with the QtQuick. The tutorial covers how to make scalable interfaces only the basic stuff though but it should be good enough to get you started. Here is the URL: http://qt-project.org/videos/watch/using-qt-quick-for-rapid-ui-prototyping-and-development With this as a starting point iv'e been able to create a dictionary app with just QtQuick framework. Well why a dictionary app? 1) I found a really cool minimalistic UI design 2) Had a couple of cool looking color schemes that i could pick 3) I didn't have to create an infinite scrolling list :D 4) Minimal requirements. With these i've started designing the application. Most of the tutorials claim th...

It's been a while since ive' looked at Qt. I used it extensively during my masters project and pretty much every project that i worked on in the college. I even made a 2D top down game using OpenGL and Qt along with a couple of my friends as a course project. I even taught a class how to get started with Qt using PyQt. The most recent experience i've had with Qt was looking at PyQt being used for creating a DB access software at University of Groningen. It was written based on Qt3.0 and upgrading to Qt4.0 was causing all sorts of problem that is when i thought Qt probably lost it's way with all the Selling / Ownership transfer / Shift of focus on Platforms etc. Now saying that i love the power of Qt for creating GUI's is an understatement. The documentation and the examples provided made it so easy to pick up the Toolkit. I was worried they might have misstepped too much and lost control of how awesome it used to be. Recently i came across some article which...

With the advent of the ios/android/wp8 there has been a steady rise in the digital comics market. A very immersive experience with audio / animations and some times even gameplay. This takes the already fun experience of reading comic books to a whole new level. Imagine the your favorite comics coming to life at least partially, with audio and animation effects. This idea has fascinated me and i decided to spend some time trying to figure out how best to do it. Here are some of the goals that i wanted to achieve for this: 1) Ease of creating content 2) Ensure that only the data changes for putting out a new comic. 3) Be Cross Platform Enter ComicNext  A new framework that will make creating digitial interactive comics for mobile phones / tablets very easy. We were able to create a quick prototype of how a comic book would look, you can try it out yourself HERE .  This is obviously in beginning stages and will take time to be widely available but, If you ar...

In my last post iv'e covered about how to write a plugin without actually over-riding the unity activities so you can peacefully co-exist with other unity plugins (for android). The reality is that you will have to deal with people using Prime31 as one of their plugins. This can be a problem if you need to get callbacks for the android system event callbacks like: void onCreate(Bundle Intent){ } void onStart(){ } void onStop(){ } and so on. You get the idea. Fortunately the prime31 guys provide us a method for registering a class to get callbacks from these methods on the activity. The details of which are provided at the following url https://gist.github.com/prime31/0908e6100d7e228f1add/raw/a5d96177c8d8fde548068d2a15de49acdb2023ec/Android+Activity+Sharing This is pretty straight forward If you know how to use Android ADT/Eclipse for creating android projects. Here is how you go about it. 1) First create an Android Project. Mark it as a library project. 2) Add ...