Monthly Archives: February 2011

Tools for creating a game

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In today’s post I would like to review the tools I used to perform the different types of tasks involved in the development of New Sokoban, my first iOS game.

Development

Xcode

When saying “development” I mean those tools that help me generating the code of the game. So, the first one is Xcode, the main development IDE for creating any kind of app for any of the Apple devices and computers. Xcode comes with the Mac OS. I have not used any other IDE on Mac OS, so I can’t compare. But I have worked on Windows and Linux using Visual Studio for C++ and Netbeans for Java, among others.

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New Sokoban – The art of making art

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In today’s post I’m going to talk about art asset creation for New Sokoban. My artistic skills are limited and I am an autodidact in this field. So, I needed to create the art for New Sokoban taking into account this limitations. My idea was to create abstract assets playing with plain colors and some basic effects like shadows and border strokes.

I started with the game screen because I felt that it was the most important one and that it would set the artistic path to follow. In the following image you can see what was my first try.

New Sokoban Art creation - First try
New Sokoban Art creation – First try

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“Creatinology”

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“Creatinology is a mental illness that makes people’s brain creativity skills constantly fight to their brain technology skills“. Of course, this doesn’t exist (yet) but if so, I would have it for sure. I have been a lot of years working in a technology environment where people only were interested on if “it works or not”.

So, in some sense, my professional education is technology predominant. When my brain tries to think about work (even if the work is making games) it is difficult for me to avoid trying to solve the technological problems first in my mind. “Is 3D or 2D?”, “Needs animations?”, “Particle effects? If so, how would I implement it?”. This are the kind of questions or thoughts that I still need to train my brain to avoid when thinking about making games or, in general, any kind of app.

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Designing New Sokoban

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In this post I would like to explain a little bit what New Sokoban is (or should be). I’m going to describe in a few paragraphs the first steps of the design process. However, I have been working using an iterative methodology, constantly revising all the aspects of the game, including the gameplay design. So, actually, the design phase could not be considered to be absolutely completed yet 🙂

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