Author Archives: Toni Sala

About Toni Sala

Indie game designer and developer

Muster my Monsters Gameplay video

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It has been a lot of time since my last post. I have been extremely busy polishing Muster my Monsters. But finally, the game is finished! :D Exact release date isn’t determined yet , though.

Here you have a gameplay video and in the game page you have more information.

I would love to get some feedback. Please, leave your comments about the game in the comments section of this post.

Moreover, I am running a beta test on TestFlight. If you are interested on becoming a tester of Muster my Monsters contact me.

Thank you very much!  ”:^]

I’m loving Unity

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Ok, just to let you know: I’m loving Unity LOL. I think it’s just the natural evolution of any game creation tool. I guess that all the the big AAA companies have developed their own tools similar to Unity. But for little studios like mine/me Unity is kind of a dream. I will encounter issues for sure, but for now, here you have my second little demo :p

Unity Demo Basketball

LAUNCH DEMO

First contact with Unity3D

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These days I have been playing around with Unity3D. In case you don’t know Unity3D yet (really?), it is probably the most popular non-free cross-platform game development tool. It covers almost the whole development workflow: prototype, design, programming and deploy. You could even create some simple 3D art for a simple game.

Unity has been in my TO-DO list for a long time and finally I grabbed some time to get into it and create something with it. And it is amazing! :D It is a bit intimidating at first place, but the more you use it the more excited you get :)

I definitely will create and publish some professional game with Unity, but for now, here you have my first demo project. Thanks to Ray Wenderlich for the great tutorial! “:^]

Unity Demo

LAUNCH DEMO

Muster my Monsters: Procedural Animations Model

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One of the most important aspects of Muster my Monsters is the animation system. Muster my Monsters is a semi-interactive game in the sense that you do not control directly the characters in the game but chose the actions they will execute. In some sense, it is like choosing the cinematic sequences that will be played in a while.

Muster my Monsters is a social/party game featuring terribly horrible and ridiculously weird fighting-monsters.

So, the quality of those cinematic sequences is critical. They need to be very visually appealing and, most important, they need to communicate the state of the game precisely to the player.

Muster my Monsters’ basic rules are similar to the rock-paper-scissors game, but in MmM we have ruder actions: Attack wins Mock, Mock wins Dodge and Dodge wins Attack. And this is called “balance”.

Chuck, Muster my Monsters' character

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Custom cocos2d Action for rotating a sprite around an arbitrary point

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Cocos2d is and excellent framework. It has saved me tons of time during my game projects. It offers almost everything I need. However, sometimes there are some features that are not supported by cocos2d.

This is the case of rotating a sprite around an arbitrary point. Rotation in cocos2d is based on the concept of anchor point. This is ok on the 99% of situations, probably. However, during the development of Muster my Monsters I need to perform rotations around arbitrary points. The idea is to have an sprite “orbiting” around another sprite or some defined point in the space.

cocos2d rotation around arbitrary point

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Sprite sheets. Managing them easily on Cocos2d

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In today’s post I would like to share with you a handy piece of code to manage sprite sheets. I have called it TSSpriteSheetManager.

TSSpriteSheetManager is a singleton cocos2d class that allows for easily manage sprite sheets. You just add sprite sheets to the manager and then request a sprite or frame automatically batched for you. The manager will search for the sprite in all the added sprite sheets and if it is not in any of them, it will search for individual files on your project.

You have the entire source code for this project at the end of this article.

Sprite sheet Muster my Monsters

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Exporting Flash Animations to Cocos2d Actions

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Exporting Flash animations to cocos2d actions is a topic that has been in my mind since some months ago. Spritesheets based animations are very limited in terms of sprites size and frame rate. The more frames you have, the more memory you consume. And the bigger the sprites, the more memory you need as well.

However, actually, memory usage has not been an issue in the projects I have worked so far. So, exporting Flash animations to cocos2d is a task that I have been procrastinating… till now.

Exporting Flash Animations to Cocos2d Actions

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