Matt Warren

Author: Matt

  • Winter Bike Riding

    So I decided that rather than paying for driving/parking to get to work this winter I am going to bike. I picked up a cheap bike from canadian tire last night that should be able to survive the -30 degree temperatures outside and should be sturdy enough to not break down on the 6KM ride…

  • Loading iOS Assets From The Web

    One of the big challenges with making a big iPhone game is that to do the graphics justice at the caliber expected by gamers these days is hard. There’s just too much data to package the iPhone/Retina iPhone/4 inch iPhone/iPad/Retina iPad assets all together in one bundle. So for my latest game I’m kicking things…

  • Winterstart Banff Run

    Last night Heather and I went to Banff for a night run. It was a pretty enjoyable event that we’ll be sure to do again next year.  The race was packed with 2000 runners all done up with glow sticks and head lamps running in the dark.  To cap it off the after run party…

  • Creating a Resource Management Game on iOS

    Over the last week I’ve been trying to reverse engineer some of the hit games on iOS like DragonVale, Pocket Planes, Tiny Tower, Simpsons Tap Out and Paradise Cove. These have been historically some of the most profitable games on the App Store. They are complex resource management type games and I want to create…

  • Getting ready for Winter

    Winter seems to have struck early here in Calgary. It’s left me with a bit of a conundrum for getting to work.  All of the transit options in this city suck including driving your own car. The buses are never on time, and always delayed or late The C-Train doesn’t get me to the office, and gets…

  • A New Game Project

    It’s been a while since I’ve worked on an iOS game.  After the disappointing sales from Zombie Tap Out I figured that the game section of the App Store was getting a little to difficult to compete in. I’m finally ready now to get back in the game and start working on something new.  The idea for…

  • Gamification of Everything

    Gamification is the process of adding game mechanics to things that are not games. There are really two motivations for the use of gamification.  The first is that people who develop games have learned a lot about what makes a game engaging, fun and addictive and we can take what they’ve learned and apply it…

  • ABT: Always Be Testing

    Sales teams often have the letters ABC plastered somewhere next to their weekly leader boards and top salesman photo. It stands for Always Be Closing and it’s a motto that keeps sales people laser focused on their goals. Marketing teams should have a similar motto: ABT – Always be testing. Lately I’ve had the opportunity…

  • Doing Hard Work

    There are several hard problems in computer science that seem to be getting solved in a real way. Google’s Driverless cars are perhaps the most recent example of computers taking on a challenge assumed by many to be impossible just a few years ago. And they’re doing a good job. In 2015 they will have…

  • Migrating to Amazon RDS

    I’ve been suffering from some scaling issues lately and since my system administration skills are fairly rudementary I decided to opt for Amazons RDS services for providing a MySQL server that is properly built with the appropriate block devices and automatically kept up to date by Amazon. Moving my existing database over to an Amazon…