Localizr gearing up for Launch

As some of you might know, I've been pretty busy recently working on a project called Localizr.com.

Localizr's goal is to ease localization processes in the games industry. During my 10 years of work experience in the games industry, game localization has been one of the most painful tasks. Typical localization processes involve the game developer, the publisher, one or more localization agencies and their respective translators and proof readers. As the lowest common denominator, Excel files are exchanged via Email between the individual parties to transfer textual assets and localizations.

If all goes well, the developer sends a single Excel file containing all textual assets. These assets are passed on to the publisher who in turn distributes them to his localization agencies of choice. The agencies hand the files to their translators who will translate the strings and hand the strings back to the agencies. Now it's the proof-readers turn to make sure that the translations properly match the source texts. Once all texts have been proof'ed, the proof-reader hands them back to the agency, who passes them to the publisher who, finally, sends the files to the developer.

So far so good. But now assume that the file has to be amended while it's in translation. How much fun to maintain all these different file versions! Or assume that a translator slightly changes the structure of the Excel file. Is your tool chain capable enough to cope with that change? Maybe a cell is inserted at the wrong location in the Excel sheet. Who's able to make sure that source and translated text still match up?

These are some of the reasons why I felt that there has to be a better way of localizing games. Localizr is our approach and has been well-received by both, publishers and localization agencies, during our closed beta test.

We're now gearing up for public availability of Localizr and have just launched our website. Have a look at Localizr.com and let us know what you think! Leave a comment or get in touch directly via our website or by sending a mail to bb (at) localizr.com.

I'll keep you updated while we're rolling out more features on our website. Once the product is live, we'll invite you to take it for a test ride!

UIPageControl - let's customize !

Over on AppTech I have posted a small article about how to customize a UIPageControl so that it can be used on a white background.

UIPageControl provides a view similar to the white dots on your iPhone's home screen for use within an app. As you might know, it only displays the dots in white so it's virtually unusable on a white background. Hop over to AppTech to discover how you can customize UIPageControl and leave a comment!

http://apptech.next-munich.com

Network Availability and Transparent OpenGL

Two more blog posts are online on http://apptech.next-munich.com.

The first post goes into details on how to use the Reachability class provided by Apple to detect network availability on iPhone and iPod touch.

The second post describes my first dive into augmented reality apps. In this particular case I give some information on how to integrate an OpenGL view managed by cocos2d with the UIImagePickerController. It details where you have to modify cocos2d code to make the OpenGL view transparent - which is a requirement in case you want to overlay the camera image with the OpenGL view.

Audio Recording

Quick post on audio recording in iPhone apps on App Tech:

http://apptech.next-munich.com/

So Close! and the Global Game Jam 2010

I don't know whether you're aware of this but last weekend saw the Global Game Jam 2010, an event organized by the International Game Developer Association promoting the development of and experimentation with the concepts of games.

The Jam itself is an event held at a single weekend all around the world. People who love developing games gather for a 48 hours hackathon, creating a full-blown game from scratch. To give you an impression of what such an event is capable of: last weekend, more than 4000 people were registered as participating in the event creating a mind-boggling 900+ games in only 48 hours. Impressive, isn't it? For a full list of games developed in Munich, have a look at our event's page.

For me, it was the first time I participated in GGJ - and I had hell of a good time. We met up Friday at 5pm for an initial brainstorming session which eventually led to a couple of game concepts which were pursued over the next two days. The team working on our game "So Close!" featured two Graphics Artists (Thorsten Folkers and Willi Kunth) along with our Game Design lead (Daniel Helbig of remote control productions), the Sound Masterbrain (Daniel Pharos of Knight's of Soundtrack) and myself starring as Coder of the Day. Once the initial game design was fixed, we started developing an initial prototype using cocos2d which quickly proved that our concept was indeed feasible. After a lot of initial headaches trying to get Chipmunk (a physics / collision detections engine) to work, the platforming aspect of the game fell into place and revealed a very rewarding gameplay. We spent pretty much all of Saturday evening polishing the gameplay and added some last minute mechanics on Sunday. Unfortunately, time was too short to implement Online Highscore posting using cocoslive by Sunday 5pm (the official deadline) but is scheduled for inclusion. Since we really believe in this game's concept, we're even going to release the game on the AppStore later this month!

For all you coders out there, you can grab the source code on the official GGJ website. For anybody else, you can find video footage of the game on YouTube.

GGJ has been a fun experience which I can only highly recommend to anyone who enjoys developing games or would like to have a closer look at what game development is like.

Direct iTunes Links

Today it's time for creating proper direct iTunes links for pointing to additional content from within your App. Check out my latest post on http://apptech.next-munich.com for the details.

Invalid SSL certificates

Just posted a small piece on ignoring invalid SSL certificates within an iPhone App. Be sure to head over to http://apptech.next-munich.com to read the article.