Mediocre game technology

This summer me and a friend released a physics puzzler for iOS and Android based on fluid simulation. It started as a really small project almost a year ago, but grew along the way and has been really well received on both platforms.
Last year i posted movieclips from a fluid simulator I was working on, and the fluid in Sprinkle is basically the same algorithm, but in 2D and with lots of optimizations. The simulator is particle-based, but not traditional SPH. Instead, the pressure and velocity is solved with a regular "sequential impulse"-solver. It's quite a mindjob to work out the constraint formulation, but it's worth the effort, since you get unconditionally stable fluid that is reasonably fast and interacts seamlessly with rigid bodies.



The most compoutationally intensive operation is neighbor finding. I'm using a pretty standard spatial hashing technique, with a twist. Each particle gets assigned which quadrant within the cell it belongs to, and a table is us…

I've been working on a mobile, physics-based game over the last five months (I'll post stuff about the project very soon) and today I started toying around with Android and porting the game. I'm not really sure what to think yet honestly. Some things are better than iOS development and other things are quite annoying. I really appreciate having command line tools for everything, and the ability to login to the device and do maintenance. Especially the ability to login and run a shell command on the device via a command line tool on the host. That way you can run scripts on your development machine that coordinate things both on the device and on the host at the same time. Awesome!
When it comes to development tools I think command line tools are far superior to graphical user interace in most cases (except for debuggers). I'm pretty happy with visual studio, but it's probably because I've been more or less forced to use it every day for the last ten years. Nothi…

I'm following quite a few game programming blogs, and whenever there is a post about a lifehack or general wisdom that can help me simplify my work I'm all ears. So, I thought I'd share some of my own experiences:
Automate everything that can be automated. Especially project file generation. Editing project files is a real energy drainer, and even though IDE's are trying to make the process smooth, it never is. This becomes a big problem first when multiple platforms come into the picture. Personally I have a Python script that take a few input parameters, scans the source tree and outputs a nice project file for Visual Studio, or a makefile. You have to bite the sour apple every time Visual Studio changes it's project file format, but it's so worth it. I also have similar scripts for documentation, distribution and in some cases code generation. Writing the scripts take a while, but they can be reused, you get better at writing them every time you do it, and it…