Our first game is out!

(copied from Lucera's blog)

We are very happy to announce that finally our first game is out!

Its name is LittleGame. It's an educational-entertaiment game for kids. It contains four games and it's cheap, please buy it!

Here is the app description:

The game is vital in many aspects of social, emotional and intellectual development of children and has a significant impact on academic learning. It is one of the most powerful vehicles that children have to good try and learn new skills, concepts and experiences. The game can help children develop the knowledge they need to connect meaningfully with the challenges they discover in the school.

The children's game is an activity that can be approached from many points of view, one of them is education.

LittleGame incorporates four different games designed to develop different abilities of children:

- Pairs:
  - Develop the capacity of attention.
  - Facilitate a strategy of memory through image association.
  - Develop the skills of classification, recognition and assimilation of concepts.
  - Develop the capacity of short-term memory and to form partnerships and relationships.

- Silhouettes:
  - Ability to object recognition.
  - Discrimination of shapes, colors, sizes and positions.
  - Ability to play models.
  - Analysis, hypothesis, comparison, trial and error.

- Mazes:
  - Develop the skills of children and their powers of observation.
  - Improves concentration.
  - Develops creative thinking and constructive.
  - Increases dexterity.
  - Develops sensitivity, imagination and creativity.
  - Improving the development of perception.

- Sudokus:
  - Stimulates and enhances their math skills, logic and critical thinking.
  - Excellent learning tool that helps strengthen the skills of reasoning and calculation.

Alea jacta est

(copied from lucera blog)

Finally we finish our first game in time and submit it to iTunes Connect. Now we can only wait the validation process from Apple.

Maybe now is time to end the port of our libraries to Android and submit it to Android Market.

Unfortunately, as we do not have an operative web, we don't have an easy way to distribute our application for Windows, Linux or MacOSX. Although in this case would have to redo the graphics to higher resolution.

In any case, our Christmas holidays begin!

Merry Christmas to all!

We are back

(copied from lucera blog)

Hi!

After theese days trapped in bureaucratic issues, finally we are back to work.
We want to finish our last game and we want to publish it before Christmas. We are conscious that there is a lot of work ahead to be able to finish the game but we think it will be posible.

Wish us luck!

Trapped in the bureaucratic spiral

(copied from lucera blog)

The last week there have been no news because we were involved in bureaucratic issues and we are attending an intensive course in management and business administration that will finalize the next week.

This has prevented us from making great advances in recent days, despite of that, we have been making some small internal changes and we have been testing some of our latest features added.

Improved layer system

(copied from lucera blog)

MindShake has improved its layer system.

Until now the layers were little else that an object container, but now you can:

* Set the layer position, affecting all the objects inside.
* Modify layer render order.
* Scale independently each layer, horizontaly or vertically.
* Set its pivot, to move each layer snugly and make nice transitions.
* Modify the layer alpha channel or colorize (tint) it, to make some cool effects.

And, of course, you can still enable camera transformation to leave the system to adjust the layers relative position and scale to do automatic parallax scrolling.

All these changes affect the contents of the layer and you can make some effects more easilly now.

Unified Layers

(copied from lucera blog)

At beginning we mistakenly thought that was better to separate objects per kind because we thought that this way would be simpler for the users and we wanted to promote the use of layers because we think that is is a powerfull feature.


But now we think that is better, and easiest, allow the user decide how he/she wants to distribute the objects across layers.


In this way we unified SpriteLayer, TextLayer and 3DModelLayer (not available) into ObjectLayer. Thus, the only different layer at this point is TileLayer that is in fact wholly different from other layers.

Notes about new event StateChange

(copied from lucera blog)

Note that if you reach a state for the first time the order of the events will be:

1. ExitState (last state)
2. StateChange
3. Begin (for which behaviors associated with current state that have not been yet initialized)
4. EnterState
5. ...

For this reason we are able to make some configuration changes in this event, because it will be before than Begin