jak tiano

Now iSee It! v2.0 Now Available!

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 20:36:56 -0400

If you’ve been following along with my “Building an iOS App” series of posts, then you can see the end result now! It took about 8 days from when I submitted my binary to being “In Review”. Once I was in review, it was approved within 20 minutes, and another 30 minutes later it was in the store. It’s now updated and available for purchase, just in time for WWDC. Feel free to check out the iTunes Preview page via the link below.

LINK: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/now-isee-it!/id383755611

P.S. I also just submitted a bug fix that also has a slightly nicer icon.

So with my focus on text based posts about programming recently,...

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 21:18:24 -0400

card front

card rear

So with my focus on text based posts about programming recently, I haven’t posted much of my art-y work. Next week I’ll be attending WWDC in San Francisco, so I made this business card that I’ll be passing out. It was made in Hexels, a cool grid based drawing program (except the text on the front, I did that in photoshop).

Building an iOS App: Part 3

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 22:56:00 -0400

My last update was about a week ago, and as of this post, my application is now finished and waiting for review in the App Store. Since then I’ve finished tweaking the main features, cleaned up all the bugs, tested on multiple devices, and went through the process of submitting the app via iTunes Connect and Xcode.

From where I left off last time, the first thing I had to do was fix my orientation issues. The way I had set up my application, I allowed rotation to both landscape positions in addition to portrait. Unfortunately, this caused my AVCaptureVideoPreviewLayer to get double rotated: the camera’s image was already physically rotated, and then again by it’s parent view being rotated this. I solved this problem by modifying the ViewController’s willAnimateRotationToInterfaceOrientation: method so that it could detect where it would be rotating to. Using it’s destination orientation along with it’s current orientation, it calculates how many degrees to adjust for and then applies an AffineTransform to the AVCaptureVideoPreviewLayer so it is oriented properly.

Next I set to work on fixing the flash issue, which ended up being really simple. Basically, I set up my model to track whether the flash was currently on or off, and then when I unpause the screen, I made a method in my model called resumeTorch, that just turns on the torch if it was supposed to be on. Like I said, pretty simple.

After that I began to mess with adding more states for my custom UIButtons. I gave it custom draw routines for a highlighted, selected, and an inactive state. I also overrode the setHighlighted: and setSelected: methods, and wrote my own setActive: method, in addition to adding a new ‘@property(nonatomic) BOOL active’ to manage that state. This allowed my to set my zoom buttons to be inactive when the user could no longer zoom out any further, and later on it let me disable the torch button on devices that don’t have a camera flash.

Once everything was in order, I decided to look around and see how I could optimize the features for different devices. I ended up adding some logic that enabled the preview to be a higher resolution (1080p) on the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5, and also gave those devices a higher maximum zoom. I also disabled the torch on devices that don’t have a torch.

Once I was finished with these optimizations, it was time to set up the application in iTunes connect and prepare it for upload. I edited the app description to match the new features and devices that it supports, in addition to filling out the update details section. Since my application was such a facelift from the previous version, I added a completely new batch of screenshots, including some for an iPhone 5. Luckily, my sister owns an iPhone 5, because it would be difficult to get screenshots at that resolution since the simulator doesn’t include camera functionality. After screenshots, I made up a new icon and added it to the bundle. Once I did that, I was able to lock in the update which was then ready to receive a binary from Xcode.

Before I finalized it, I noticed that when my application loaded, it jumped straight from my splash screen into my app. To make it a bit smoother, I added a quick little animation to my viewDidLoad, where it displays the Default.png over everything, and animates it scrolling off the side. I thought it would just add a little bit more polish.

Anyway, from there I created a distribution certificate, set the build settings for distribution, and used Product>Archive to build my binary. I went to the organizer>archives where I then verified the build, and the uploaded it to iTunes Connect! It is now uploaded and awaiting review. It only took 12 days from start to finish, working an average of 3 hours every 2-3 days to complete, test, and submit the update.

I hope you enjoyed this three part series following the creation of an iPhone app from start to finish. I was mostly following a diary format instead of a tutorial, so I left out a lot of specifics, and infrequently displayed code. I wanted to get more behind the process I used and the problems I had to overcome, so you could get a feeling for what types of things come up when building an app. I’ll probably post a final update when the app is approved (or denied!), but besides that, thanks for reading! If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Building an iOS App: Part 2

Mon, 27 May 2013 15:54:59 -0400

It’s been a few days since I posted the first part of this series, and the app has made considerable progress. With a few moments to spare, I’ll document what I’ve gone through, and what remains.

I left off last time with the goal of adding zooming to my model, and fully implementing the camera overlay. This process ended up being a lot quicker than I anticipated, and I’ve made more progress than I thought. To implement zooming, I added a zoom property to my model class, and set two constants (MIN_ZOOM and MAX_ZOOM). There were then two methods called increaseZoom and decreaseZoom that are pretty self explanatory, increasing/decreasing the zoom property, and making sure to keep it within it’s bounds. Both methods then return the resulting zoom level, and my ViewController uses this number to create a CGAffineTransform and apply it to my AVCaptureVideoPreviewLayer (via a method called setZoom:), which is anchored at it’s center. This results in a smooth zoom in/out feature when the user taps the +/- buttons.

Next, I looked into implementing the camera flash as a torch, which was as simple as adding [self.device setTorchMode:AVCaptureTorchModeOn] within my model (between a lock/unlockForConfiguration call) inside a function called toggleTorch. After looking a bit deeper, I found setTorchModeOnWithLevel:error: and decided it would work better for my app, so I now use that function and set the torch to 25% brightness. I linked up a torchPressed: IBAction in my ViewController, and set it up with my toggleTorch method in my model, and now I have proper zooming and flash!

With those features out of the way, I moved on to my last feature: screen pausing. I wanted to find a way to let the user tap the screen to pause the video feed, so they don’t have to hold the phone steady. After researching a bit and exploring the documentation, I found that the easiest way to do this would be to toggle my AVCaptureVideoPreviewLayer’s connection.enabled property. This may not be the best way to handle it, but it is simple and gets the job done with one line of code, so I will be using this for now. This was connected to a large invisible button via a screenPressed: IBAction.

With all major features now implemented, I need to work out some kinks (changing the devices orientation messes with the camera, pausing the screen turns off the torch, my custom UIButtons don’t have a highlighted/selected state), in addition to device testing, and app bundle polishing. Hopefully, this app will be done within the next few days, time permitting.

Building an iOS App: Part 1

Thu, 23 May 2013 17:59:01 -0400

Since I’m away from my main computer, I haven’t been able to work on my game engine this week. Instead, I’ve been working on building an iOS app. I decided to revisit an app that I made in June ‘10, called Now iSee It. It was the first iOS app that I ever made, and it was essentially a digital magnifying glass, marketed as a replacement for glasses when you forget them. It was pretty light on features, which is forgivable since I basically taught myself Objective-C as I built it, but there was still some value in the idea. So now, three years later, I decided to give it a complete overhaul.

While I assume it is usually best to get the core features working before you start working on making it look nice, I decided to start with the UI since it was such a small project. The old version of the application used a grey UISegmentedControl that spanned the bottom of the screen as the primary (and only) control for zooming. Now, since I might want to have different levels of zoom for different devices (5MP camera on the 4, and 8MP on the 4S and 5, maybe more on this year’s iteration?), I decided to ditch the set zoom intervals, and go with a +/- setup. These are 25% of the width of the screen, and are set in opposite corners along the bottom. Between them is a larger button for a new feature: flash toggle. This button will allow the user to turn the camera flash on and off, if the device supports it. All of these buttons are a custom subclass of UIButton that I made, that uses the CoreGraphics API for drawing. I’m going with a “flat” aesthetic for the design, so these buttons are square and neutral colored, and have a transparency gradient going from 80% at the top to 40% at the bottom. This makes it so you can always read the button label, but can also see the camera view behind the buttons.

the new controls

Next I started to tackle the live camera feed. In the original version, I used the UIImagePicker to display a camera feed, but for this version I’ll be using AVFoundation and AVCaptureSession/AVCaptureVideoPreviewLayer. This should hopefully give me a bit more power for a feature I’ll discuss in my next post. Or maybe even the one after that. Anyhow, the AVCaptureSession is managed in my model class, while the AVCaptureVideoPreviewLayer is a property of my ViewController, and a sublayer of my self.view.layer. As of right now the camera feed is displaying, but isn’t sized correctly.

My next tasks are to set my model up to support zooming, and then link my buttons to control that behavior. Camera flash should follow relatively quickly, and then I’ll look into implementing my “secret” feature. Then it’s just a bit of testing on devices, making some icons/splashscreens, and then I’ll submit the update to Apple. Hopefully there isn’t more than a week (10 hours of work) of development left, but I’m usually bad at estimating time. If things go as planned, my next post will be about camera zooming with AVFoundation.

Building a Game Engine - Part 3: Particle System

Thu, 16 May 2013 22:51:18 -0400

I know a particle system is probably a bit unnecessary at this stage in development, but what is a better way to test my graphics system? It actually made me go in and add scaling and tinting to my Graphic class, and that all works nicely.

Anyhow, the particle system works in it’s current setup, but I feel like I’m going to revamp it. For now, you read in the particle types and effect types from external files, and then create emitters with effect data. The emitter creates a pool of particles, which it then manages. Right now you have to tell it how large to make the pool, but I think I can set it up so that it reads the timing data to figure out how large it would need to be.

My current problem with the particle system, is that each particle has its own Graphic that it updates. I’d prefer it if the Particle objects just kept track of their position, rotation, scale, and color, and then the effect itself has a single (or set of) Graphics objects that it draws to the screen repeatedly using the data from the particles. I’d have to go in and rewrite parts of my Animation/Graphic classes to do that though, so I need to sit down and decide how I want it to fit together.

Unfortunately, I’ll be unable to make significant progress on the engine until next Saturday, so this might be my last update for a while.

On a side note: I just received a student developer scholarship from Apple, and I’ll be going to WWDC in San Francisco this year! (if money permits that is)

Building a game engine - Part 2: More Graphics

Mon, 13 May 2013 19:04:00 -0400

Today I spent a good 6-7 hours continuing work on my engine, focusing on trying to finish a basic graphics system. I finished up my animation class, and made a Graphic class that holds position, offset, and rotation information which it uses to draw the animation that it holds. Besides flipping and tinting, I’m mostly done with “sprite” type stuff. I also built a GraphicsManager class that loads up all of the sprite sheets and splits it into sprites and animations. You can then create Graphic objects from the animations, and assign those graphics to anything you want.

The next step was a particle system, since I’m working in the graphics anyway right now. I’m about a third of my way through that, and should probably finish it up in about an hour tomorrow… it’s not too special.

Recap: animation, anchor points, rotation, Graphics, GraphicsManager, and the beginning of a particle system.

Building a game engine...

Sun, 12 May 2013 13:00:42 -0400

Not sure if game engine is the right word, but that’s what I’m calling it. I’ve been wanting to make games for the iPhone for years now, and I feel like I finally have the technical skills to do it, so I’m building my own game engine using OpenFrameworks (openframeworks.cc). So far (since this morning), I’ve built out a basic graphics system that is composed of SpriteSheet, Sprite, and Animation classes, and with this system I can create and draw 250 sprites per frame at 30fps on the iPhone 4, so I’m finally going to have a tool with the level of performance on mobile that I’ve been looking for.

In the coming weeks, I’ll keep detailing my systems as I build them out, starting with finishing the graphics system (more robust manager classes to deal with keeping track of spritesheets and animations, and also a particle system), then moving on to an events system. At that point I’ll have the bare minimum functionality needed to start building games, so I’ll probably start on one of my projects and add to the engine as I go.

I guess we’ll see where this takes me.

Extreme Fly Fishing 2003* This was one of the biggest projects...

Fri, 03 May 2013 15:19:58 -0400

Extreme Fly Fishing 2003*

This was one of the biggest projects I’ve worked on since starting school, both in terms of scope and team size. This was six people, two designers, three artists, and one programmer. I took the role of Producer, Designer, and Composer on this project, and composed all the music (except for one song, but it will be replaced before release). I managed the team of six developers over the course of 6 weeks using a loose form of Scrum, and we were overall pretty successful in executing our original vision. The game runs on iOS and Android, and will hopefully be available for free this summer on the respective app stores for those platforms.

*your milage may vary

So, I made this game (Zach Collins and Ryan Leslie did the art)...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 10:36:00 -0400

So, I made this game (Zach Collins and Ryan Leslie did the art) a few weeks ago at a 4 hour game jam hosted by Microsoft. You play as the Super Sexy Laser Overlord, who has recently lost the favor of his people. You can play it at the link below, and it’s also available in the Windows 8 Store (for free). Hope you get a chuckle out of it.

http://www.anthonyblake.org/content/WebGames/Super_Sexy_Laser_Overlord/index.html

This is my final project for Intro to 3D Art and Animation....

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 21:51:00 -0500

This is my final project for Intro to 3D Art and Animation. Everything in this scene was storyboarded, modeled, textured, rigged, animated, rendered, and cut by me. I used 3 wood textures from CGTextures.com, but other than that it was just me, Maya, and Photoshop. Took about 3 weeks/40 hours.

After way too many hours here they are… a fully textured...

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 22:32:00 -0400

After way too many hours here they are… a fully textured crate and barrel. UV mapped, Normal baked with detail added to the normal via crazy bump, specular mapped, and a very nicely photoshopped diffuse map, with a lot of help from cgtextures.com. Both objects are made with less than 300 triangles.

That was a good 80 hours of my life.

Another flash project. Horizontal shooter. Reused a good amount...

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 15:48:41 -0400

Another flash project. Horizontal shooter. Reused a good amount of code from the vert shooter, but added some new features, such as the GUI at the bottom of the screen, and power ups. Also, I have no idea where the song came from, my friend gave it to me, so I just threw it in there. Wanted to add some light enemy AI, but only had a week to do this project so I ran out of time.

Here is a crate I’ve been working on for a texturing...

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 15:25:00 -0400

Here is a crate I’ve been working on for a texturing project. The first shot is the preliminary normal bake, the second is the AO bake in addition to the normal bake, and the last image is my fully textured crate. I still have to finish scuffing it up though, adding some dirt and whatnot, and then finish with the specular map and the detailed normal map, but it’s pretty close to how the final will look. (There are a few problems in the first two images that were fixed by the time I got to the third image, mainly in the edges/corners)

This is my second flash project, this time a vertical shooter....

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 20:10:00 -0400

This is my second flash project, this time a vertical shooter. Spent a lot of time getting a system in place to keep track of the dynamically spawned bullets and enemies and checking for collisions. Pretty happy with how this came out.

This was my first flash project. We had to make a maze that had...

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 18:23:00 -0400

This was my first flash project. We had to make a maze that had a level transition.

Follow up as my final model. Unfortunately, as per norm with...

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 19:48:00 -0400

Follow up as my final model. Unfortunately, as per norm with school projects, I ran out of time. There were a lot of small details I didn’t have time to put in, but I think it came out fine. Put a LOT of time into this, and I’m pretty happy with it being my first 3D model. This particular image was created as a joke.

So this is a 3D Model I’ve been working on for the last...

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 10:46:00 -0400

So this is a 3D Model I’ve been working on for the last week or so. I’m almost done modeling, then I’ll go on to making a final render and such. This is actually the first thing I’ve ever made in Maya, so I’m pretty proud of it. It is pretty high poly though, so I’ll have to figure out how to create convincing models with lower poly counts too. Anyway, I’ll post another shot of it when it is complete :D

HAHA! BUSINESS!

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 10:43:39 -0400

I have things to post here now. So I’m gonna do that.

MSRP

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 17:52:12 -0500

Go on Amazon right now. Try to find me one game that is currently selling for $59.99. Skyrim, MW3, BF3, Uncharted 3… I can’t find one game that costs more than $49. A lot of them are $30 something too, or even less. I think this is interesting, because I’ve believed that $60 has been too expensive for a while now. Also announced today was the pricing for PSVita software. The MSRP for the games varies, from $9-$49. For example, the new Uncharted game for Vita has a list price of $49.99 on amazon right now, while WipEout 2048 is at $29.99. I’m not sure how correct amazon’s prices are, but it hopefully sets a precedent for the next generation of consoles. I will gladly pay $60 for the next Uncharted game, but if other games (like Need of Speed, or other not as blockbuster games) retail for $39, or even $29, I would be way more likely to buy them, as I’m sure other people would be too. As a whole though, I think games need to be shorter and cheaper. The average game should cost $29.99 and be 6-8 hours, with no multiplayer. Maybe make it $39.99 for a 6-8 hour game with multiplayer, and there should only be a few full budget $60 titles each year, which would be the big exclusives. Multiplat games like Skyrim, CoD, BF, and Assassin’s Creed should be $50.

Anyway, food for thought.