Sean Scaplehorn - Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials

Sean Scaplehorn is a programmer with 15 years of experience in the videogames industry work on projects for both console and mobile devices. He has worked on games published by companies including Sony, Electronic Arts, Konami, Square Enix and Namco.

Sean got his first home computer still at primary school which kickstarted his interest in programming.After learning to code from typing in listings printed in computer magazines he went on to write his own games shared with his school friends.He knew then that writing games was what he wanted to do when he grew up.

However, on leaving university, Sean spent a couple of years writingsoftware for printing che books.When he could stand it no longer he made the leap into videogames development and hasn't looked back.

He worked at Ideaworks3D, the company behind the Marmalade SDK, for four years.In this time he saw the Marmalade SDK evolve from in-house technology to being a product in its own right, when it was launched as the Airplay SDK.

Sean now works from his home in the South of England as a freelance game coder.

I would like to thank the following people for their help and support writing this book.To my wife Sandra and daughter Kara for their patience and understanding Daddy "wrote his book" and to Marc Evans, a longtime friend and colleague, for his invaluable feedback on my writing.

I would also like to thank Simon Pick for giving an eager young man the best first job in the games industry he could have wished for and Tim Closs, CTO of Marmalade, for kindly taking the time to review this book during its development to ensure its accuracy.

Joshua Bycer is a game industry analyst with over 7 years of experience examining game design and the trends of the industry. He has been published locally on game sites Gamasutra and QuarterToThree, and internationally in Igromania Magazine. He has maintained the blog site chronicgamedesigner.blogspot.com since 2007 and is in the process of setting up his new site game-wisdom.com

His goal is to expand critical writing on the industry to better examine future trends and raise the standard for critical analysis.

Tim Closs has over 20 years' experience of commercial software development, and joined Marmalade in 2004. As CTO, Tim has lead the creation and productization of the Marmalade SDK, and continues to drive the company's technology and product strategies. Tim holds a Mathematics degree and Theoretical Physics postgraduate diploma from Cambridge University.

Marc Evans has been developing software almost as long as he has been playing games, and is currently involved in improving the content creation experience for the artists and designers of major console games.

Jern-Kuan Leong has been interested in programming ever since he started playing computer games on his 286s. He spent career in enterprise software development, and quickly jumped into the games industry when the opportunity came. He has worked with LucasArts for years and more recently with NVIDIA. He continues to explore the joy of game programming and design to this day.

Ronald Tan Heng Neng has worked at Ubisoft, IBM and is currently the producer at 12 Gigs, Inc. (www.12gigs.com), a cross-platform social mobile casino games network in San Francisco Bay Area, with hit titles on Facebook, iOS, Android, and Amazon.

Since obtaining his BSc (Hons) in Business Information Technology at Birmingham City University (United Kingdom), Ronald has garnered more than a decade of professional program/project management experience. This valuable experience also led him back to his passion in games, with a focus on games production and execution. Ronald also holds the highly soughtafter Project Management Professional (PMP) and Certified IT Project Manager (CITPM) certifications.

In his spare time Ronald enjoys reading, traveling, developing small games and blogging occasionally on topics he's passionate about at http://ronald-tan.com.

Francis Styck has been developing games since his college days at UNLV pursuing an Engineering degree in the 1980s when games were written in Assembly language on the Atari 800 and Commodore 64.He continued with his education at UNLV and graduated with an MBA in 2001.Today he is still writing games but now uses the power of C++, Marmalade and cocos2d-x to support many platforms and devices.You can stay in touch with Francis using LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/styck.

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