Art side of things: Sushi World customer designs

A Sushi restaurant game cant exist without Sushi loving customers come in to challenge your Sushi making skills.  Sushi World’s stage is set in many different countries around the globe, and I need to come up with lots of different customers for each stage.  In this post I am going to show step by step how I design them.

First of all, finding a good model is the key, you need lots of different faces, races, ages, professions… the more divers the better, think of casting for a movie, you need faces with different characteristics, in our case it also need to represent the country.

In this post, i am using my daughter as the example and she will be one of the customer in the China stage. (dont worry i asked her and have her permission before i post her picture :))

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Catch the Monkey “Kindle Fire” Ready!

We’re excited to announce Catch the Monkey is live on Amazon for Kindle Fire!

For only $0.99, you and your family can enjoy this adorable monkey adventure for hours of fun.

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Zynga Crashing

Farmville still farming users?

I just read this arstechnica article on how Zynga is failing fast.  Revenues are down from last year, customer erosion is increasing, and they overpaid for OMGPOP makers of Draw Something.

I would say these results are predictable given the general issues I identified in the article on free to play.

I predict the slide to continue for zynga for the following reasons:

1. Draw Something Failed to Innovate, Instead it Infuriated

 
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Catch the Monkey “Nook” Ready!

We’re pleased to announce Catch the Monkey on Nook by Barnes & Noble!

For only $2, you and your family can enjoy this adorable monkey adventure for hours of fun.

Available Now at BN.com!

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How to Download and Mount Expansion File Resources in Marmalade C++

Problem:

You have a marmalade C++ game in excess of the 50mb limit imposed by an android store.  How do you split up your game, download the required assets from an external server, and make it all work as if nothing happened?

This is what I was faced with about a month ago when we released Catch the Monkey for android.  Our android phone version is 78mb.  Google Play limits an APK to 50mb.  Our Kindle Fire and Nook version is 270mb.  Both those stores limit the APK to 50mb.

While Google Play will host an expansion file and automatically (you hope) deliver it with your application download it may not.  The amazon and nook stores do not host expansion files for you, so you must host them yourself.

Solution:

This article documents how I split up my game assets and used HTTP download from my or google’s server of an OBB file.  I then mount the OBB file as a zipmount, and pull resources from there.  This has no performance impact on the game.

I wrote in a previous article (Google Expansion Files, LVL Checks, JNI) how to deal with Google Play to get the URL of your expansion file for manual downloading, so while that code is in this source code, I will skip over it and focus on the generic downloading obb issues.
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