Technology

UKIE invited Stuart (our CEO) to speak at their event Making Games for Esports.  

Academia and Industry have created a forum and body to help further Esports education, practise and and learning.

Show people around without leaving your chair We know that showing people around offices and houses is hard.  It takes time to arrange, wastes time for no shows and conversion rates are lower. Instead we have a better way.  Give your prospective clients a way to look around themselves but make sure you're on hand to answer questions or even take them on a tour. Our 360 virtu ...

One of the easiest ways to create a game server is to use server-in-a-box / off-the-shelf technologies like AWS’s GameSparks or Microsoft’s PlayFab.

It’s often assumed that plugging these tools into Unity is difficult; i’m going to show you that it isn’t!

“Off-The-Shelf” Game Servers Overview 

Both Playfab and Gamesparks are excellent and equally as easy to integrate into Unity.  But there are a few key differences in there implementations and ability that gives producers & developers pause to think about which one they should implement.

Because the two services are similar in what they do, the main differences between the two are the features, and how simple they are to set up and use.

The limitations of each platform can vary, and Playfab makes it very easy to see just what you can do with each payment tier (including free), and what capability you get for your money.

Why use Unity for Prototyping?

Unity is a great tool for rapid prototyping, it allows you to make changes quickly and build to a variety of different platforms without having to alter the code, which is handy too say the least.

We often build mobile games to HTML5/canvas which allows clients to play the game while development or changes are in progress without having to install APKs or Testflight.  This allows a tighter team interaction and allows producers to see changes and work with them quickly.

We find even where the finished game will use a different engine or be coded natively to a platform (for example Unreal Engine or iOS or Android native builds) then Unity allows us to move much much faster with a prototype and that iteration allows a better final product once we move from prototyping and design into the productionisation/realisation phase of the game.

Unity is great for proof of concept work as you can quickly make a scene, shove in a few objects and get them doing what you want pretty quickly. It might not look great, but getting the mechanics down is fairly quick and easy.

Unity is great for quickly scaffolding up the build for a VR or AR application. With inbuilt integration with vuforia for AR, and Oculus or OpenVR for the VR side. This means that without having to go through the rigmarole of searching through various websites for there SDK's, and you can get down to the fun part of actually building your application. You can, however, go to other VR development providers such as HTC and Google for there SDK’s and install them to build for their platforms. 

Summary Games present some unique challenges and one of these is efficient scaling for multiplayer games (or indeed any games with a server based element). Let's take a look at why game scaling is hard, and what makes it different to scaling business apps. Multiplayer Games To allow multiple gamers to play a game and have a consistent version of the universe requires a sing ...

We were promised personalised medicines, jet packs and flying cars by now..  why is integration still difficult?

What's "Integration"?

In short, it's connecting two systems or data sets together.  This could be as mundane as ensuring that an app has access to your employee lists all the way to merging companies and ensuring that information is shared effectively across all of their systems.

For app/websites/platforms we're typically connecting data to the platform via APIs or data access and/or connecting multiple systems so the approach is seamless.

For data / BI / Big Data projects are largely about ensuring that the right data, at the right granularity and the right time period are viewable and usable.

At Code Wizards, we love Umbraco. It's a fantastic flexible CMS and, for us, it's the right tool for the job 99% of the time.

But if you've not spent a lot of time with Umbraco it can sometimes be a little unclear how you can add middleware in to the OWIN pipeline.

Especially when a new major version of Umbraco is released and things have drastically changed.

We were thrilled to be part of R U Hacking. A great event with a fantastic group of talented and enthusiastic hackers. #RUHacking It was encouraging to see the wide array of technologies being employed and fascinating to learn about how each team decided on their challenge and solution.  Teams didn't play it safe and many of them utilised languages and frameworks they had neve ...