Build your Own AI - Part 1

Or Implementing Live Ops and In-App Artificial Intelligence

Live Ops is about introducing Artificial Intelligence (AI) to customise the user’s experience keeping them engaged and maximising the value they get from the software.

It is particularly appropriate for video games where the AI can dynamically change the game parameters making it easier or harder, rewarding the player or even just providing hints and tips at the right time. Live Ops Services are available out there on the Net but they are expensive and require third party APIs to be built into the code potentially putting them beyond the reach of those who can afford neither the cost nor the impact on their apps.

This is the first in a series of articles where I will demystify Live Ops and Artificial Intelligence by describing my journey to build an AI from scratch and incorporate it into my existing mobile games. Do you want to read about a real-world example of making AI work or are you a software engineer or an Indie game developer who wants to build Live Ops into your own projects? If the answer is Yes then read on as these articles are for you!

Designing For Test

Mobile apps are difficult, expensive, and time consuming to test made worse by the large number of different mobile devices available that they must work on. The right design approach can vastly reduce this cost and effort by making it much easier to test effectively, and giving a high degree of confidence in the finished product.

My name is Graeme Clarke and I’ve been developing software for nearly 30 years. Although by day I’m a manager, I still write code at home for fun. In this article, I’ll show example code from my latest mobile game: ‘Otherworld: Epic Adventure’ which is currently live in production and on sale in Amazon, Apple and Google stores.

Un-deprecating UIWebView in Xamarin Forms

Since the 30th of April, many software houses and developers using Microsoft Xamarin will have fallen foul of the dreaded 'Deprecated UIWebView' issue which stops new apps being released to the Apple Appstore!!

Microsoft has provided a fix in the latest versions of Xamarin but upgrading is fraught with dangers and may not even be possible. As a result, businesses are now faced with the painful decision of either dropping Apple support or significantly delaying the launch of their new apps.

Having spent hours trying to unsuccessfully upgrade Xamarin I fixed the problem directly within the old version of the Xamarin code myself. It took less than 40 minutes before I had a new working app available on the Apple store with minimal disruption to my code and timescale!

Read about my innovative solution in this latest article of my Streetwise Tech series where I present easy to follow steps with screenshots and samples taken from live apps. I also describe some of the issues encountered in the upgrade attempt to help anyone considering that route.