The Pickford Bros Blog Viewer

I've hardly played any games lately. Not switched my Xbox on for months, and the Wii and PS3 have only been on because they're used for iPlayer and DVDs respectively. I've just been working on finis...

Playing Magnetic Billiards on iPhone 3G. Speed problems seem to have vanished with appropriately sized graphics (previously I was using iPad graphics scaled down in realtime). The iPad controls are su...

Tidying up lots of loose ends on Magnetic Billiards today. Quite chuffed with the visual effects for 'Foul' and 'Buzz'. Really simple but effective. We're only missing cluster shape detection and a...

Magnetic Billiards now has four distinct control methods (switchable in-game). They all work really well so it's really a matter of person taste. Haven't tried them on the iPhone yet (just the iPad...

Implemented an alternate control method - 'DONUT CONTROL'. It's mainly aimed at the iPhone version as it allows you to control the shot using most of the screen space regardless of the balls size (...

Just a rough video of the new touch controls for Magnetic Billiards on iPad.

It always amazes me how often I find two completely different causes for the same bug. Fixed a persistent crash bug (twice) and got the game running on iPhone 3G. Well more limping than running but...

I was planning on a couple days rest after working silly hours last week but I couldn't resist a cheeky bit of coding today. Got the "buzz" multiplier working. Getting "s" ranks on some levels now.

Ace to get people playing our game in the pub on friday. It was worth the risk of taking the iPad on a night out. It seemed to go down well. Now to get it finished.

Got sound music & sound effects working. Except the sound effects stop working if you turn the music off on the Simulator. Works fine on the actual ipad. Ho hum. I love it when the game you are...

Just gave my wife the iPad to try Magnetic Billiards for the first time. She's trying a new control method I just implemented today. I left her to it so see if she could figure out the controls wit...

IPad dev fun. Who knew about this pre-multiplied alpha malarky? No wonder all the sprites were looking murky and rough around the edges. All sorted now and everything seems to render a bit faster.

Porting code to a different language would be a lot easier if I could resist the temptation to 'improve' it at the same time. I don't know what the idiot who wrote this was thinking.

Finally got the menu system working. NSStrings are a right pain. Now everything is in place I can actually get the gameplay ported.