Saturday, June 16, 2012

The Future of Tutorials

Hi Guys,

Just wanted to post up a quick little blog update about what's going on with me and how I'm hoping to do things in the future for tutorials on the website. As some of you may be aware, I've recently gotten myself a new job, which is taking up a large portion of my time, and as much as I would love to continue to make movies with my dulcet tones and instruction, I just don't have the time any more.

So - that leaves me in somewhat of a predicament, I want to continue to provide all of my followers and readers of the blog with the quality tutorials that I've been putting up in the past months, but I can't physically sit down and dedicate the time to actually doing it - so I've resolved to putting my writing skills to good use and I'm now going to be instructing through the medium of the written tutorial.

To make things easier for myself, and to ensure that everything is kept in proper order, I've gotten myself an account with Envato's Tut's+ to host all of my tutorials on - this will allow for all of my old videos to be put up as well as the corresponding text also.

As for what the future of my tutorials holds, as I said in my last post, I'm going to be moving away from Flash in a somewhat smart fashion because I feel that the language is becoming stagnated and there are better alternatives out there for game development and I intend to show you all just exactly how to do that with my new series of tutorials.

I'll be looking mostly at mobile development, because that's what I've been developing on all this time, and the skillset that I've acquired at my new job has given me sufficient skills in the mobile programming field to consider myself to be somewhat of a authority on the subject. In the next series of tutorials I'm going to be looking at:

 - The development lifecycle (mobile).
 - Debugging on Android and iOS.
 - Cross-Platform development for indie game developers ($$$ = :( )
 - Mobile games & Database driven gaming
 - Node JS - a beginners guide (this warrants an entire series of tutorials on it's own - it's a big field)
      - Setting up the node
      - Modules and you.
      - Encryption and hashing
      - Database management & REST calls

 - jQuery, EaselJS & the Flash Actionscript killer.
 - In-App Advertising, who to pick and what to call them
 - In-App Purchases, how to set it up.

These topics are all things that I would like to cover and will be writing on in the near future. I DO still intend to finish off the last part of the Nape tutorial series, but I am certainly keeping my focus on the mobile gaming side of the spectrum as I feel that it's going to become a huge part of the future of gaming.

In the mean time, feel free to check out TutsPlus as it's already chockers with tutorials on many different subjects.

Cheers,

David.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

SPGames - Flash & What's next

Hi everyone that reads my blog.

I just wanted to have some face time with you all about what's been going on on my end and where the next in the tutorials is going to be. For all of you that have been following my Nape series, I will be wrapping them up next tutorial. I understand that they've been highly sought after and have been some of the only tutorials written for Nape.

However, in my current job, I have been doing less and less Flash actionscript programming and a lot more on Javascript, HTML5, Python and several other languages, however, what I have been doing most of all is server client architecture and the technologies behind it such as Node js. This had brought me to an interesting point in where I want to go with my tutorials and what I want to be showing you guys.

I'm currently in the process of developing a mobile game which I intend to send out on both iPhone and Android, it has given me a lot of things to think about in terms of languages, server communication, database storage and most importantly, game logic and how to make the game fun whilst maintaining income and the like.

I would hope to be finishing the Nape tutorial in the near future and then I'll start putting my documentation together for the next series, which will start with Node JS and the technologies that are behind that.

Cheers,

David.