About Toni Sala

Indie game designer and developer

Developing tools for creating a game

Some months ago I wrote an article on this blog titled “Tools for creating a game“. On that article I talked about the tools I used to develop my first iOS game New Sokoban. The message of that article was summarized with this mental note:

Mental note: always use existing tools. If there is a tool that barely fits your needs use it. You will be amazed about how quickly you adapt yourself to that tool and how your productivity increases.

However, currently I’m working on a new game that needed a very specific and game dependent developing tool. So, unfortunately, I spent about two weeks developing, testing and refining a development tool for my new game. In today’s article I’m going to share the experience.

Xcode icon

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A Facebook reusable class

In today’s post I’m going to share a piece of code that allows your games to easily connect to Facebook. It is a singleton class designed to be reusable, very simple to use and with only one task in mind: post new high scores on Facebook. You can find the example project source code at the end of the article.

The aim of this post is not to teach you about how to use the Facebook API to connect your iPhone games to Facebook. There are a lot of articles covering this topic and the official Facebook developers site. In this tutorial I would like to put the emphasis on the reusable and simplicity to use aspects. It is very easy to integrate in your projects the piece of code I’m going to show you.

Facebook icon_big

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Game Theory Applied: The Flow Channel

In today’s post I would like to start a series of articles about Theory of Game Design and how I applied (or tried to apply…) it to my projects. Usually games are made by inspiration and intuition. And this is not a bad approach because, at the end of the day, game creation is a deeply creative activity.

However, there are some game design aspects that have been theorized by experienced game designers that, despite sounding quite obvious, it is worth to keep them in mind while working on our games. I would like to start by one of the most interesting and effective concepts of game design: The Flow Channel. Applying this concept to New Sokoban had a very positive impact on the games experience. Despite it being an intuitive aspect of games that you could have learned while playing a lot of games during your live, the first time I red about it was in Jesse Schell’s book The Art of Game Design. By the way, this book is highly recommended for game designers out there and wanna be game designers like me 😉

Flow

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From lone wolf to pack member

In today’s post I’m going to explain a little bit how my routine as an indie dev has changed in the last few weeks. I have experienced a really big change since New Sokoban was presented and released. I have gone from the lone wolf indie dev style to an intensive collaborative working style. And only in 2 months!

The Lone Wolf

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18 months on the App Store

This is my first article that is going to be included into the iDevBlogADay series. So, I would like to encourage you to read the About page and the Welcome post if you want to know a little bit about me. You can also find all my own iOS projects on the Projects page.

I started my own App Store journey as an indie about 18 months ago. It has been an incredible experience, with lots of satisfying moments and also some frustrating ones. With successful stories and also with non so successful ones. However, the most important thing is that I have learned a lot about living in the jungle of the App Store. In today’s post I would like to share some experiences with you.

App Store icon

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Gamelab 2011. Trying to avoid the unavoidable

From June 29 to July 1 has been celebrated in Barcelona (Spain) Gamelab 2011: the international videogames conference. I have been there the whole three days attending almost all the conferences and walking around the playing area. So, I have seen and lived probably the 95% of this Gamelab 2011. In today’s post I’m going to talk about my vision of the conference and the benefits I got from it.

Gamelab

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Modal view controllers in cocos2d

Today’s post is going to be a tutorial-style one. One of the (few) annoying things of cocos2d is the fact that it is very unrelated to UIKit and the Model View Controller paradigm of Apple’s views a view controllers. This is a problem when you need to show, for example, a view controller modally to send an e-mail or show Game Center leaderboards and achievements.

In this tutorial I am going to describe the technique I use to connect with “Apple’s layer” from cocos2d in an easy, modular, reusable way. You will find the project source code used on this tutorial at the end of this post.

Cocos2d Mug

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Trucoteca app development. Games cheats on iOS

In today’s post I’m not going to talk about New Sokoban development 🙂 A few weeks ago I got the opportunity to work on a project for developing and iOS universal app. So, today I’m going to talk a little bit about the development of this app called Trucoteca and developed with Trucoteca.com.

Trucoteca icon

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New Sokoban postmortem

Today’s post will be a classical one: postmortem of New Sokoban. New Sokoban was officially launched around a month ago and I think that it is enough time to write this post. Basically because I think that things are not going to change a lot in the future concerning New Sokoban. So, here you have what went right and what went wrong.

New Sokoban icon

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Synthesize: first iOS dev event in Málaga, Spain – My conclusion

Some time since the last post. I have been a little busy the last two weeks but today I’m back 🙂 In today’s post I would like to share my personal conclusion about Synthesize, the first iOS dev meeting in Málaga, Spain, where I was invited to do a little talk. As you may expect if you follow this blog, this is not going to be a regular report of the event. I’m going to share with you my thoughts about how the event affected me.

Synthesize Malaga

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