Double Fine chooses Moai

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Category: Blog

Created on Tuesday, 01 May 2012 15:49

Written by Todd Hooper

Great news for the Moai community! Double Fine Productions, who made history in March by raising more than $3.3 million on Kickstarter.com, have chosen to build Double Fine Adventure on Moai.

The team at Double Fine kindly filmed a video covering the reasons behind their choice of Moai and showing some of the very earliest Double Fine Adventure development prototypes.

It's been a great month for Moai and Kickstarter projects, with Shadowrun Returns, another Moai powered project wrapping up their drive on Sunday as the third-highest funded Kickstarter project of all time at over $1.8 million. Thanks to everyone who supported these great games!

- Todd

Continuous Integration and Moai's New Monster Build Server

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Category: Blog

Created on Thursday, 26 April 2012 15:35

Written by Sean House

You may have noticed that it's been three weeks since our last Moai binary SDK release and wondered what we've been up to. Well, lots - we have plenty of bug fixes, documentation and new hotness that we're eager to release to Moai developers. But there’s one thing we had to tackle first - our build infrastructure.

We've spent the last several weeks assembling and configuring a monster build server to ensure that Moai has state-of-the-art build support going forward. We've added continuous integration builds, turned on warnings as errors in most projects, added automated nightly builds and fully automated the production of our binary SDK. Over time, we'll add automated unit and build verification tests and static analysis where it makes sense.

What does this mean for Moai developers? It means that we're going to be able to produce binary SDK updates more frequently, more easily and more consistently. It also helps to reduce the risk of adding new features and functionality to the SDK and thereby will improve and stabilize the quality of the binary SDK. In short, it's going to allow us to raise the bar for the quality of the software we produce.

So, thanks for your patience while we finish getting our house in order and be on the lookout for a new binary SDK built by our new monster build server soon!

-Sean

Wolf Toss Released on Amazon App Store, Kindle Fire

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Category: Blog

Created on Wednesday, 11 April 2012 14:41

Written by Mike Arcuri

Wolf Toss is now available for Kindle Fire and on the Amazon App Store for Android.  Other Moai games Go Go Kiddo, Out of the Box, and Horns and Halos Photobooth are already live in Amazon App Store, but Wolf Toss is the first Moai game released using the new Amazon in-app purchases API (which just became public yesterday).

If you have a Kindle and haven't already side-loaded the game - check it out today.

Shadowrun Returns is 200% funded

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Category: Blog

Created on Tuesday, 10 April 2012 18:02

Written by Mike Arcuri

Thanks to everyone who's supported Shadowrun Returns on Kickstarter.  The game is most definitely on for iOS and Android tablets, Mac, and PC.  After six days, Harebrained Schemes's idea is just about 200% funded.  If they break $1 million, they'll add a second major city to the game.  I'm dying to see a Shadowrun version of Berlin, Tokyo, or Shanghai!

Read more: Shadowrun Returns is 200% funded

Shadowrun Returns on Kickstarter

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Category: Blog

Created on Wednesday, 04 April 2012 09:13

Written by Mike Arcuri

Revitalized gaming properties and genres are all the rage this season, and one of our favorites has just gotten off to an explosive start on Kickstarter.com this morning: the return of Shadowrun as a 2D, turn-based strategy game for PCs and Tablets!  Jordan is the original creator of the Shadowrun pen and paper RPG, and his team at Harebrained Schemes will be building the game with Moai if it's successfully funded.

In their own words:

Shoot Straight. Conserve Ammo. And Never Cut a Deal With A Dragon.

Jordan Weisman, the creator of Shadowrun, is back and Shadowrun Returns (for Apple & Android tablets and PCs) is the game that Shadowrun fans have been waiting for a long time. A graphically rich 2D turn-based single player game with deep story interaction, meaningful character development, and highly-contextual tactical combat, Shadowrun Returns is not only going to make some old geeks (like us) very happy but it will introduce new players to a dynamic gaming universe that is beloved around the world.

If you're interested in this game or genre as a player or a developer - please back Jordan and the Harebrained Schemes team today.

    Go, go, go guys!

    - Mike.

Moai SDK 1.0 (revision 3)

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Category: Blog

Created on Tuesday, 03 April 2012 17:30

Written by Patrick Meehan

Most of the improvements this revision were from our contributors, so a *big* thanks to AJ, Byron, Chris, Evgeni, Joar, Nathan, Odie, Rodrigo, Thomas and Tommo (did I miss anyone?) as well as all our awesome past contributors.

Also, a big thanks to the companies using Moai (you know who you are) for sharing your feedback improvements.

There is a breaking change in the Box2D wrapper. See my forum post.

There's more on the way. Expect to see Revision 4 along with more documentation in a week or so.

Release notes after the fold.

Read more: Moai SDK 1.0 (revision 3)

Android Fragmentation - Maybe Not Such a Big Problem

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Category: Blog

Created on Tuesday, 03 April 2012 15:14

Written by Mike Arcuri

In the last few months, some have been arguing that Android is just not worth it as a supported platform because of the stream of inbound support requests and device specific problems.  But those of us on Moai team have also be hearing strong evidence to the contrary from our friends in the industry - one game studio with a higher ARPU on Android than iOS, several that are seeing outstanding monetization on Kindle Fire, and another that pursued an agressive cross platform strategy, weeded out many platforms that weren't worth the effort, and kept Android as a must-support platform.

Todd recently took the debate a step further by sharing the Zipline Games Studio perspective from supporting Wolf Toss on 500+ devices (Android 2.2 and above), and expressing a strong opinion about the importance of QA.  Here are the best bits of his post on TheNextWeb:

"In January, Wolf Toss was featured on Android Market, and shot up to a million users in a week, with over five hundred different Android device types. Yes, there were lots of users complaining of bugs and resolution issues, but it didn’t stop our average review exceeding four stars.

The team and I spent long evenings and every weekend testing on each Android device we identified as having an issue... Guess what we found after weeks of testing? Yes, there were device differences but most of our problems were rooted in classic software engineering issues. We did see some crashes on specific devices, but the catalysts were devices that have less memory or run more processes which were causing the underlying issues to be exposed more often.

Read more: Android Fragmentation - Maybe Not Such a Big Problem

Moai SDK 1.0 (revision 2)

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Category: Blog

Created on Tuesday, 27 March 2012 18:26

Written by Patrick Meehan

Revision 2 is going up now. This Revision restores the missing doxygen docs, tweaks some APIs and fixes a number of bugs and broken samples. Release notes below the fold. Look for the next release with documentation later this week. We'll also starting bringing in some of the pending pull requests and contributions.

Read more: Moai SDK 1.0 (revision 2)

Moai Cloud 1.0

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Category: Blog

Created on Monday, 26 March 2012 15:17

Written by Rob LaRubbio

We are very pleased to announce that Moai Cloud has moved out of beta and is now at version 1.0. When you first login to your dashboard the first thing you'll notice is the new look, but the changes go much deeper than that. They include:

• Access to 5 Moai Direct services
• Vastly improved logging support
• Detailed Metrics and System Monitoring
• Easy integration of admin dashboards for your services
• Protect and secure your services with Client Keys and API Secrets
• Transparent Ops including horizontal scaling, OS management, hot standby servers & backups

Read more: Moai Cloud 1.0

Moai 2012 Roadmap

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Category: Blog

Created on Monday, 26 March 2012 12:26

Written by Patrick Meehan

This has been a long time coming. I owe all of our developers a brain dump on what the future holds for Moai. In no particular order, here’s what’s on our radar both around features and our own internal process maturity. More after the fold...

Read more: Moai 2012 Roadmap