Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Two beginner friendly environments to develop mobile apps


APP INVENTOR


MIT App Inventor is the fastest way to build apps for Android phones and tablets. Even with no prior experience, you can learn to build apps within hours. -LINK

GAMESALAD


Create games for iOS, Android, & HTML5. Drag & drop, no coding required. With over 750,000 developers and 50,000 games published, GameSalad Creator is the fastest and easiest way to create, publish and monetize your mobile games.-LINK

Monday, May 25, 2015

Tech used in a popular online game

A tweet by Scotch Development: "Agar.io - An #html5 and #canvas game that uses WebSockets. "

Comments on apps, money and marketshare

Most app developers don't make bank on the apps they develop, but a decent sum can be obtained by many according to web sources, a few can and do indeed make bank. The marketshare of IOS and Android is over 96% so it is worth it to focus on these two.

 Android appears to be in the lead according to this source http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25450615  .

Another source verifies this
  1. Android has hit a new milestone of popularity: it now owns 81% of the world smartphone market, according to a new market research report from IDC. That's not a huge jump. It was knocking on the door of 80% market share last quarter, when it hit 79.3 percent.Nov 13, 2013-link

 So it might be a good idea to focus on Android development, but engines that facilitate porting of your application to multiple operating systems might be preferable.   Unreal Engine appears to do so, and for free.

Once there if the app is for android, google would be a decent partner for ads in case the app is going to be free.  LINK http://developer.android.com/google/play-services/ads.html

Unreal Engine 4 2d tutorials link and vid and some nice 2d development software




 LINK Tutorial playlist 


2d games tend to be easier to develop than 3d games, this is a useful series of video tutorials on the free unreal engine by Muhammad A.Moniem.

Two software that reduce character animation times follow:

Spine 2d


Spriter


For music one would use Fruity Loops or similar software or public domain works.
Sound effects there are some free, others can be recorded with a microphone, and others can be licensed for a fee.

Unreal engine 4 features video



The  rich features provided by unreal engine.  These features allow for state of the art 3d graphics and scaling up of content into more complex domains as one venture's into more advanced projects.

Short comments on engines

Good engines for developing games are unity and unreal engine 4.

 Unity has a cost, and Unreal Engine is Free.

 Other free engines include wave engine and genesis-3d.

 There are plenty of tutorials for unreal engine and unity in english, but less documentation and videos for wave engine and even less for now for genesis-3d.

 Engines drastically facilitate game development.

UPDATE: unity is now free too under certain conditions

Video on monetization, aka, making money off of the apps



Ios is seen as more expensive and with smaller marketshare compared to android, also several methods of monetization are discussed among other things.

Free art, music, and game assets from the public domain



LINK http://open.commonly.cc/unlocked

Some individuals have allowed their works to enter the public domain after meeting the required funding.

Hi and welcome to my blog

In this, blog I'll be posting youtube videos from tutorials I like online, and general information on resources, monetization, and development of games both mobile and non-mobile. Will also link to my youtube channel, where I might also do some tutorials of my own.