Hi,

the game development indie/groups/companies appears and disappear every day, and in argentina are just a few in this business. just wanted to make a list and little review of the more relevant and still living projects, if you are looking for someone to make your game, or just want to contact them. also i know there are a lots of companies that make outsourcing, but i just wanted to list the small ones, to give them a little more of web presence.

if you have any suggestion for this list (add/change/delete any entry) just send me a email (david [AT] y-developments.info ) or make me a comment here.

be aware that the description (at least for the indies) are write  in a funny way

indie people:

Tyranus

One of the promises in the indie world (?). he usually make that strange indie games, but at the same time, suitable for all the people, experimenting with the gameplay and the user experience. have improved her art skills in the last year, but anyway all his work have the correct art for the project. he usually work on flash, using flixel, and making pixel art. he is working now in a big and secret project that could change the world (ok maybe i’m exaggerating, but will be awesome anyway )

web: http://www.tyranus.com.ar/

contact: alejandro.adrian.iglesias[AT]gmail.com

2bam (nitram_cero)

The most ugly, crazy, and beared men in the argentinian indie scene. anyway, even with all his defects, is a good guy, with crazy ideas and *usually* know what he is doing. from a personal opinion, i’m amazed from his knowledge, he knows flash,c/c++,asm (?) and how to cook the rice xD. right now is working for a company making games (i’m not sure if a can say the name, sorry ) but he will be always a indie, making those flash and pixelated games. his last work was a entry for the last CODEAR, you can see it here. he also made a flixel map editor called flan, that you can see here

web: http://www.2bam.com/

contact: twobananasandmilk[AT]gmail.com

Daniel Bermegui

The indie Super Star, some people say that is a legend, other people say that have seen hus half-hair head (the urban myths says that he lost half of the hair making a art game called today i die ) i don’t  know him too much, the last time i have seen some comics drawn by him, that i think still needs work, dunno what is he doing now, usually his project are a secret at least for me )

web: http://www.ludomancy.com/

contact: daniel[AT]ludomancy.com

Martin Gonzalez

martin is….. martin great experience making games, one of the founders of DarkSpell games, and creator WAK. he also developed  several commercial games in companies as joju games, sabarasa etc.. right now is working in vostu and making a top down killing zombies games, i hope we could see it soon

web: i think don’t have one

Puelo Games

My old friend, puelo, he also make games ! he started making clones and is still doing it but is making some original project that we hope could see soon right now is working in a innovative TD type game, and making snowboard in his 5 star resort in rio negro (?) (yes, he is a eXtreme dev )

web http://www.puelogames.com.ar/

contact puelogames[AT]gmail.com

il Mare Games

another one that i don’t know too much, anyway his work have improved a lot from their first games. dunno what is doing now.

web http://ilmaregames.com.ar/

Small groups and companies

Heavy Boat

a small company formed by 2 experienced professionals in the game industry, david roguin (another founder of DarkSpell games, that worked also in tons of games in companies as QB9) and  Juan (founder of 9a18 studio, that also worked in QB9) and also a great artist called leo, who really make amazing art pieces. they are working and making project for big and important companies, and also producing their own original projects, if you are looking for a company that could convert your idea into a reality, this is one of the best choices . also, if you are developer, is a MUST to read their devlog.

web: http://heavyboat.com/

contact: contact[AT]heavyboat.com

Killabunnies

a group of 3 people that live and work on santa fe, away from the capital of the country, but producing amazing and innovative stuff. the team is composed by Luciano Vairoli, leader and game designer, with a career developing games from the stone age (and i’m being serious here). he made games for 486 DX, and consoles as atari. the other 2 members are a as3 dev (mariano obeid) and a artist (andres miranda). his biggest hit is a puzzle game called bubba time a game that mix the control of the time as braid with salomon key. a great and polished product indeed. they are available to make projects, so, give him a shout

web http://www.killabunnies.com.ar/

contact info[AT]killabunnies.com.ar

Jengibre

a game dev company managed by Andres Martinez Quijano,  they focus to outsource and make advergames. they made great games for famous companies and sites as Taringa! and Fox. if you look for quality advergames, this is a good option.

web: http://jengibre.com.ar/

contact: info[AT]jengibre.com.ar

South Winds Games

SWG is a company focused to produce family casual games and managed by Juan Pablo Ferreyra. they have 3 successful games that you can buy here

web http://www.southwindsgames.com/

contact contact[AT]southwindsgames.com

and that’s all buddies, i hope this could help you in some way, if you want to be in this list, just send me a email or write a comment in this post

PD: i’d like that ipsilon development could be there, but we are not making games at this moment, and i dunno when we could make them again

Regards,

Shadow.

Hi,

i don’t like to write things that you can find on the web, but i think something like this is very useful for those server admins

you can find the complete process of how to do it here and here remember that in centOS system you need to install this dependencies:

yum install curl*
yum install libxml2*

yum install fuse-devel

and to get your access key, you can go here

i hope it help you in some way

Regards,

Shadow.

Hi,

i wrote about this in the past (you can see some post at the end) but i’m writing again as i found the perfect solution to make a SVN update after a commit to a web directory.

the difference between the old and this new one, is that the old make a svn update in all the working copy, something like that is not a problem if you have some files, but when you have like 100K files, it takes too much time and resources. so the idea was to get a list of changed directories after each commit and run a svn update on each directory.

for this i used some bash scripting and a C program (the C program is needed when the files do not belong to the user who execute the post-commit script).

in the post-commit script put something like this:

svnlook dirs-changed /path/to/your/repository > /tmp/dirschanged

while read line
do
/path/to/C/Binary/updateFolder $line
done < “/tmp/dirschanged”

and save it. remember that after the svnlook (that is what return the list of directories that has been modified)  and before the while, you can use sed to change any path of your repository and convert it into a valid full path in your web directory.

then, create a .c file and paste this code to make the binary:

#include <stddef.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{

int i;
for (i = 1; i < argc; i++)  /* Skip argv[0] (program name). */
{

printf(“making update to  %s \n”,argv[i]);
execl(“/usr/bin/svn”, “svn”, “update”,argv[i],
(const char *) NULL);
}
exit(0);

}

compile and set a chmod +s, and is done . the binary will accept any amount of arguments as paths to run the svn update, anyway i’ll recomend to make 1 at time, so you have more control of it.

i know that this code could be improved, maybe using less bash scripting and more C coding, but i’m not good as before in C, so for me was more easy to make the loop and event the replacements with sed in the bash scripts.

i hope this help you in some way

Nook Wifi turned off

Hi,

Some days ago I got a Nook Wifi eBook reader, so I’m going to make a review of it, for all of you who may be thinking of buying an eBook reader and still are not sure what to buy. So, click “continue reading” to see the complete review (it is a bit long )

Hi,

today seeing the logs of one of the servers i see that all the emails sent by one of the scripts was flagged as BAD HEADER and put it on quarantine. was something weird why i constructed the header variable in the correct way, so i tried to search for a solution. first of all i set the directive @bypass_header_checks_maps

@bypass_header_checks_maps = (
read_hash(“/var/amavis/badheader_bypass”),
);

there you can set 1 per line, all the email that you want to avoid the email header check. even that i do it, it didn’t worked for me, so i looked at the quarantine email and i look something like this:

X-Amavis-Alert: BAD HEADER SECTION Improper use of control character (char 0D
hex): Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\r

so, i erased all the /r from the emails headers and all worked

i hope this help you in some way

Regards,

Shadow.

Hi,

in the process of the migration of the server have come the moment when my boss needed to checkout a copy of the repository. i have checked several times the subversion installation and i made like 3 checkouts before even start. my big mistake have do not made a complete checkout of the repository in a windows machine (and more specifically, a windows 7 machine), this have resulted in a very large session of debugging, so to avoid you hours of work, i’m here to give you the solution to the most normal problems.

1) Error: The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

as the subversion FAQ says, this could be for 2 reason, a antivirus program or the windows indexing service. this basically happen why the antivirus or the windows indexing service move the downloaded file, so subversion can’t find it. in the case of my boss, the only solution with the antivirus (kapersky) was to disable it. in case of the windows indexing service, is not enough to disable it completely, you need to follow this steps under the folder where you are making the checkout.

* Click the start menu button, then click in the text box to begin a search
* Type in “windows index”
* Click on “Indexing Options” that should come up in the search
* When the Indexing Options box comes up, Click on the Modify button. This will pop up an Indexed Locations dialog, where you should see a list of some “locations”, with your hard drive(s) being in the list.
* Expand the desired hard drive, down to the root folder of the files you’re using SVN with, and make sure the box is unchecked. Also note that the hard drive will most likely be collapsed, and will have its box unchecked, even though once you expand it, you may find checked boxes.

2) Error: The system cannot find the file specified.

this is usually why you have 2 files with the same name with the only difference is some letter in uppercase/lowercase. the problem is that windows have a case-insensitive file system, so for windows, those files are 1 and for subversion no. the only solution is to rename one of the files. for this, if you already have a checkout made in a linux box, you can delete and make a commit. if not, with tortoise SVN you can use the repo broswer to erase directly. after that, is probably you need to delete the folder and make a update again (and maybe a cleanup in the middle)

3) Error: REPORT of ‘/svn/!svn/vcc/default’: Could not read chunk size: connection was closed by the server

i don’t know why this happen, just trying a update have continue the checkout

4) Server sent unexpected return value (413 Request Entity Too Large) in response

the first error that need to be fixed on the server, only happened on the windows 7, dunno why. basically is a apache limit at the upload of XML info, to fix that, edit your httpd.conf (usually located on /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf) and add this line:

LimitXMLRequestBody 0

and of course restart httpd/apache

i hope this will help you in some way

Regards,

Shadow.

Hi,

as you see from previous post, i’m working installing some servers, and even i have some experience doing server administration, i’m learning a lot in this few days.

i’m using linux every day for the past 4 years, and i’m really happy. i need to say that i always used distribution linked in some way with debian, as ubuntu, kubuntu, linux mint etc.

in terms of servers, i always used centos, fedora or red hat, why’s that? why they was already installed, was the only option available or if i can choose, why other more experienced devs told me that was the standard in the web industry. i always made some server administration but now that i’m really touching deep on it i’d say that i will never use a centos or red hat derivated OS again, and i will fundament this with facts and experiences from the few days.

the most biggest flaws i see on distribution as centos, is the package system, yum. i think is far to be enough capable as apt is for debian. why i say that? the search of the package is not complete as apt is, the erase of packages could bring serious problem if you don’t pay a lot of attention, i even erased yum itself erasing secondary packages O_O.

the other big problem are the repositories, and maybe this problem is only specifically for centos, but really lack of a lot essential packages, where you need to depend from third party repositories or compiling yourself. didn’t even enabling the centos plus and extra repositories you are able to get something up to date (and i’m talking about stable version released a long time ago)

if some server admin read this is surely thinking “this is a noob” and maybe is right, but measure the utility of something from the things i can get from it and in the time it takes me to do it and i assure you that all the stuff i made on centos i could made it in the half of the time for the availability of compiled packages in the repositories and the utility of apt. i know that the beautiful of linux is if you don’t find something for your OS, you can compile it with the source, but seriously, is not nice when you are working, waste hours debugging for dependencies and stuff when can be solved with a simple apt-get.

so, from me, i say bye bye centos, for now i will only use debian whenever i can, and i regret the decision to use you in this new servers.

Regards,

Shadow.

Hi,

i’m still making server administration and a migration and i learned a few things that could help you at this matter

1) look for a tutorial that fit your needs

in my case i was needed to set up a mail server. the old server have used courier for imap and pop3 and exim for smtp. event that i tried to accomplish the same, some technical problems don’t let me to do it and i made several mistakes in the process. before you write any command on the console, make a deep research in what do you need and how you can accomplish it. in the net there are a lot of tutorial that will explain you step by step what is needed to do, just follow it and all will be fine

2) a postix with mysql is your best option

i need to say it, something that worried me was that maybe i will have performance problems using mysql with postfix and courier. really the server is do not have a high load in terms of mail but even if it have it, i will research to avoid it and still using mysql. the facility to make changes, as forwarders, accounts, and a lot of stuff worth any performance consumtion, more if you need to manage a lot of accounts.

3) if you have sendmail or exim, uninstall it before anything

postfix have their own sendmail command, so is a good action to uninstall any MTA that will not be used.

4) security and iptables

flush all iptables at the time of testing, so you don’t get anything blocked, and change the default port to others. when you finish, lock all the entrant and out traffic except the used port for your services. configure and use tls, even that is better that the user will be forced to use tls, maybe is a good option to leave both options enabled for the future.

5) commons errors

a list of commons errors you can find, usually you can get a very detailed log if you edit your master.cf and add a -v at the inet smtpd directive

/home/vmail/user is not found : that means that the directory where the user emails should be stored is empty, check it and create the correct directorie(s) (depend if you are using maildir and mailbox

invalid command : this is a esoteric error and depends a lot of the context it appear, is why the server don’t recognize the client command. could be a client error or a server misconfiguration (usually is problem of the server if you are using a popular client as thunderbird)

configure postfix to use it by PHP in the mail () function : this is something cost me to figure out, as screw up installing first postfix, and later exim and get replaced the sendmail command. for this, you should have correctly installed and configured postfix, and have the sendmail command available (if you get a command not found error, backup the config files and re-install it). to configure the php to use postfix, just edit your php.ini and set the sendmail_path = sendmail -t -i (like this, as is, whiteout a full path)

fail user authentication: if you set the -v flag, you should easily see where is the error, could be that the query’s set for postfix sasl are wrong, or the mysql user used to connect to the database is wrong, or the user data in the DB is wrong. remember that the password of the user should be encrypted, you can use the mysql function ENCRYPT for that (using phpmyadmin is very easy)

i hope this help you and save you some time in this matter

Hi,

i really like the small distributions of linux, i think they can offer a lot of useful features for that admin or power user in a fast way and consuming a lot of little resources.

this time i going to write a review of this distribution called Tiny Core. the iso only weight 10 MB and is focused to bring the most basic graphic environment. and when i say basic, i mean really basic, the desktop don’t have anything more that the essential tools to mount drives, make USB installation, and make basic administration tasks. anyway as any linux have a terminal where you can make most of the things.

i wasn’t able to test it as i tested it on a virtual machine but the hardware support is poor as the intention is to offer the most basic installation possible. anyway it brings a GUI package manager where you have available the most common apps and libraries.

there is anything else to say really, is a distribution for experienced users that could be a base for any interesting project as a base, with enough time to find , install, customize and compile any driver or software needed. also could be good as a rescue distribution for an old USB or disk, as it boots really fast (less than 2 seconds). anyway in this matter i will choose better a more hardware compatible distribution.

Hi,

the developers/designers/IT people, even that most of us made the work that we love, stay for so much hours in front a computer thinking or some times making a repetitive task, it usually drawn the motivation and start to stressing the people.

in the past years i learned ways to avoid this, that will help you to complete your job and live a more comfortable life

Eat well, is the fuel of your body !

here i’m not saying you should eat less/more or make vegetarian. the key is just in the variety and the control in the foods. in a practical example, i usually eated too much meat and coke. and that make me have less energy, as the energy come from the carbohydrates and the time that the body takes to process the food is more. so i started mixing with salads, soups, rice etc.. i didn’t leave the meat 100% but now the meat is at 40-30% of my dish. should be less, but at this quantity is improving my life quality and i don’t feel that i’m eating ugly stuff .

also what you drink is important, i drinked too much coke, now i don’t leave it but i mix it with tea and milk.

Disconnect for some time

you can work for more than 8 hours per day if is needed (is not recommended) but you need to take breaks off from the computer, doing anything offline. the sports are a good idea, but if you don’t like any, can also play a instrument or spend some times with beloved ones. you can have 2 types of breaks, small ones of 15 minutes of each hour or big breaks of 1-3 hours after 5-6 of work.

Activity anti-distress

another measure is to make anything that really you want to do as, play a video game or learn a new language of programming, no matter what, whiteout worrying about the time or anything. look for a day or more at the week to make that activity.

this are some simple tips, really it need to be tested by you and see what fits better for your life and personality.

i hope this help you some way