Wooji Juice - Blog Feed

Making Lemonade, Part 1

2010-07-24T12:01:53Z

As Patrick recently mentioned, we had some setbacks that have delayed our cartoony iPhone bomb-disposal game, Alert! Safety Boom!.

I've recently been busy trying to turn this into an opportunity, working on some audio applications. The first of these hit the App Store this morning: Sylo Synthesiser.

It's an iPad app that features a musical keyboard; rather than trying to sound just like a piano, or reproduce a particular bit of arcane technology from years gone by, you can use it to make music (or special effects) using something called granular synthesis, a technique that we're not aware of anyone else putting into practice on the iPad.

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And Now A Quick Word From Patrick

2010-06-26T13:38:07Z

A number of you might be wondering What On God's Earth is happening to Alert! Safety Boom! at the moment. It's been a while since we updated you with any news and I thought I could take the time to clear it up.

It's all my fault.

The beta build has been up and running for a while now and, barring a few minor tweaks and amendments, is pretty much ready to go. Ready to go without the music, that is. This has been due to a number of minor to major annoyances at my end but, sparing you most of the details, massive flooding has caused me to have to move most of my studio equipment into storage.

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About Keynote and iPad

2010-06-08T13:48:51Z

Just a quick note, to publicly answer a question we've been getting quite a bit of mail about recently: Keynote for iPad — will Presentation Remote work with it?

The short answer, I'm afraid, is no. Sorry!

The long answer explains why:

When we control Keynote on the Macintosh, we use our free Presentation Manager app to act as a sort of liaison between Presentation Remote (on the iPhone/iPod touch), and Keynote. This isn't possible on the iPad, as only one application can be running at once — you would have to quit Presentation Manager in order to start Keynote.

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JavaScript for C & Python programmers

2010-01-19T14:46:12Z

First posted: March 2006
Updated: July 2008 (linked to JSLint)
Update: April 2009 (better way to delete Array items)
Last update: January 2010 (Array example)

This is an introduction to JavaScript. There are plenty of these on the web, but most of them appear to be for non-programmers, teaching the building-blocks of programming as JavaScript uses them. And that's fine, because many people who have never programmed in their lives, find themselves needing a tiny bit of script for their web page, and need to start somewhere.

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Presentation Remote, Apple Events, and Snow Leopard

2009-11-21T13:17:11Z

We've recently been receiving email from some customers having problems with Presentation Remote under Mac OS X 10.6 ("Snow Leopard"). It was tricky to track down the cause for various reasons, including the fact that problems typically don't even start to appear until you've been giving a presentation for about 20 minutes or so — the exact timing varies as it depends on how you're using Presentation Remote.

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Of Soundroids And Candy

2009-11-05T00:23:05Z

One of our Soundroid Rampage customers dropped us a line today to let us know he'd built his kid a custom Giant Stompy Robot costume for Halloween, and embedded an iPod touch running Soundroid Rampage at the heart of it. With a loudspeaker included for enhanced stompage, this may be the most advanced rampaging we've seen to date!

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Meet The Team: Pasha & Ozymandius

2009-11-02T21:40:58Z

Time to introduce the remaining team members, Pasha:

and Ozymandius:

Theirs is mainly a supervisory role, working with John to ensure the highest quality artwork for the project. However, as you can see by their suave and practical headgear, they're also responsible for fulfilling our mecha-piloting needs.

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Alert! Safety Boom! Cutscene Technology

2009-10-23T16:07:44Z

One of the things we wanted to do with Alert! Safety Boom! was include a story, and tell it in an interesting way. The most common (but not necessarily best) way for videogames to do this is with cutscenes — full-screen video or animation. These are generally big expensive affairs, however, and beyond the means of an ickle indie developer like Wooji Juice.

A lot of smaller games get around this by having a picture for each character in the story, and simply displaying the appropriate picture with a text box over the top. This works, and it sure is cheap, but it's barely a step above filling the screen with a page from a book. How could we go further?

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Alert! Safety Boom! Mission Editing

2009-10-06T13:33:44Z

So, how are things going here in A!SB!land?

Currently, we're hard at work getting all the missions up and running. All of them are designed, and have been created in our custom Boom Editor, but they're not all ready for testing yet — probably about 20% of them need more work done. Then we can get beta testers trying them out, making sure they're fun, making sure there aren't any bugs, and also checking the "difficult curve". Ideally, each mission is just a little trickier than the last, so that the player is challenged but never runs into a brick wall of difficulty. This is one of the most valuable things we get from beta testing.

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PyObjC in Snow Leopard

2009-09-12T15:59:40Z

As some of you may have noticed, several of our applications were not compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" when it was first released. We've since issued updates for them all — but why was this necessary? Well, I'll explain... Note: If you're one of our customers, this probably isn't terribly important info — but if you're a Mac developer who's run into the same issues, these pointers may be helpful!

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