Sprite sheets. Managing them easily on Cocos2d

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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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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