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Fengol
07-09-2009, 04:04 PM
http://cocoaheads.org/za/Johannesburg/index.html

Thursday, September 10, 2009 18:30 at Luma Offices

iPhone Games Development

This week we'll be having our meeting at Luma. We'll be discussing all kinds of technologies but will probably talk mostly about games development on iPhone.

Get the map to Luma's offices from their website: http://www.luma.co.za. Hope to see you all there.

I got emailed about this event and I'll be trying to make it (although I'm coming from Pretoria so I might be late. I thought I'd share with the rest of you awesome peeps if you're interested.

I wonder if Coolhand will be speaking?

Luke
08-09-2009, 02:21 PM
I'll probably say hello and such.

FuzzYspo0N
08-09-2009, 03:27 PM
SURPRISE. i might be there, still ;p

xyber
10-09-2009, 02:23 PM
Darnits.. now I'm down in the cape I miss all these things :(

dislekcia
10-09-2009, 03:05 PM
Darnits.. now I'm down in the cape I miss all these things :(

Same :(

Anyone going to give us an update on how it goes?

Fengol
10-09-2009, 10:23 PM
The traffic from Pretoria to Johannesburg was very kind to me at 17:00 and I actually made it to Luma by 18:15, well in time to catch the start of the presentation.

The event was organized by CocoaHeads, an Apple developers (i.e. Mac and iPhone) user group and hosted a Luma a creative studio.

After a quick whip round of introductions I'm happy to report that besides Luma employees there really are full-time Apple developers working in South Africa, mainly on the iPhone. A lot of the attendees though were like myself; enthusiasts with or without some Apple product to show for it.

Being primarily a CocoaHeads meeting Rein Hillmann started with a presentation of some a feature development that comes with Snow Leopard, Code Blocks and Grand Central Dispatch, which are like anonymous delegates in C# or Java but for Objective C and .NET 4.0's Parallel Framework for automagically managing multiple threads. Personally, I was thrilled to see how development was done on a Mac and building a GUI was FAR easier than I expected, especially compared to what you have to go through to get windows forms on the PC.

After the presentation Rein showed a top down zombie shooter he had been working on in OpenGL since their last meeting. This is someone who's NEVER made a game before and he had 3D Max modelled sprites, particle effects and a little AI for the zombies. By the time of the demo he was ready to add sound which I think you'll all agree as a new game developer is quite an achievement!

Then we breaked for pizza and cooldrinks and got talking about favourite games on the iPhone as well as the dangers of introducing wives and girlfriends to time sucking casual games like Plants vs Zombies and Peggle.

Then it was back into the meeting room where Fuzzyspoon and Diego(?) talked about the history of game development at Luma and the history behind the making of Marble Blast for the iPhone and the other projects they're working on. They also went into some discussion about team breakdown and the interactions between developer, artist, designer and director. Then the group talked about the various game development frameworks available for the iPhone and what does indie mean. Finally the discussion got into the annoyances with the orientation notifications of the iPhone (i.e. when you rotate, flip or turn the phone around) and some strategies to combat it messing up your interface and critiqued to good quality of the Apple development support desk.

By that time, people were having to leave to return back to their families, but I have to say that the event and people are so relaxed and enthusiastic about the platform that I look forward to finding out about their next event and attending.

I did take some poor quality pictures of the event which I'll upload tomorrow.

Chippit
11-09-2009, 01:31 AM
The traffic from Pretoria to Johannesburg was very kind to me at 17:00 and I actually made it to Luma by 18:15, well in time to catch the start of the presentation.

The event was organized by CocoaHeads, an Apple developers (i.e. Mac and iPhone) user group and hosted a Luma a creative studio.

After a quick whip round of introductions I'm happy to report that besides Luma employees there really are full-time Apple developers working in South Africa, mainly on the iPhone. A lot of the attendees though were like myself; enthusiasts with or without some Apple product to show for it.

Being primarily a CocoaHeads meeting Rein Hillmann started with a presentation of some a feature development that comes with Snow Leopard, Code Blocks and Grand Central Dispatch, which are like anonymous delegates in C# or Java but for Objective C and .NET 4.0's Parallel Framework for automagically managing multiple threads. Personally, I was thrilled to see how development was done on a Mac and building a GUI was FAR easier than I expected, especially compared to what you have to go through to get windows forms on the PC.

After the presentation Rein showed a top down zombie shooter he had been working on in OpenGL since their last meeting. This is someone who's NEVER made a game before and he had 3D Max modelled sprites, particle effects and a little AI for the zombies. By the time of the demo he was ready to add sound which I think you'll all agree as a new game developer is quite an achievement!

Then we breaked for pizza and cooldrinks and got talking about favourite games on the iPhone as well as the dangers of introducing wives and girlfriends to time sucking casual games like Plants vs Zombies and Peggle.

Then it was back into the meeting room where Fuzzyspoon and Diego(?) talked about the history of game development at Luma and the history behind the making of Marble Blast for the iPhone and the other projects they're working on. They also went into some discussion about team breakdown and the interactions between developer, artist, designer and director. Then the group talked about the various game development frameworks available for the iPhone and what does indie mean. Finally the discussion got into the annoyances with the orientation notifications of the iPhone (i.e. when you rotate, flip or turn the phone around) and some strategies to combat it messing up your interface and critiqued to good quality of the Apple development support desk.

By that time, people were having to leave to return back to their families, but I have to say that the event and people are so relaxed and enthusiastic about the platform that I look forward to finding out about their next event and attending.

I did take some poor quality pictures of the event which I'll upload tomorrow.

Writeup for Dev.Mag pls?

xyber
12-09-2009, 10:24 AM
Thanks Fengol.

Nandrew
12-09-2009, 08:39 PM
Writeup for Dev.Mag pls?

+1