Yesterday, 2012 September 18 was celebrated the Facebook Developers World Hack Barcelona. This was my first time in a hack/jam/coding style event and I must admit that it was a great experience 🙂
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.
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.
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.
Gamelab 2012 was celebrated from June 27 to July 1 in Barcelona, Spain. It is the most important games event in Spain and, since a few years ago, it is considered an international event.
Obviously, I was there 🙂 I was mainly interested on networking but the conferences were also quite interesting. On the other hand, the gamers zone was not very exciting. One year ago I attended to my first Gamelab and wrote a short post about the experience. My opinion from Gamelab 2011 was very negative. The organization was unacceptable, the location was not good enough and there were a lot of poor conferences. The only positive thing about Gamelab 2011 was the networking.
“AppCircus is a unique global travelling showcase of the most creative and innovative apps presented by their creators during some of the most influential international events in mobile/web. AppCircus is open to developers, startups and any other organization and offers each participant a chance to get a nomination to the Mobile Premier Awards.”
On June 21 was celebrated in Barcelona the AppCircus Dev Day. On every AppCircus event all kind of app developers are invited to submit their apps to the contest. I finally decided to submit New Sokoban, despite I was sure that it was impossible to be selected as finalist.
Today I would like to redirect you to Beginning iOS Development. Some days ago I was asked by them to answer some questions about iOS development and the indie life in general. We talked about a bunch of topics such as the troubles an indie developer may encounter while trying to make a living of app development, the first app I created (paintingWalls), how to succeed as an indie dev, how to market your apps with no budget, etc.
To be honest, I think that the questions were extremely appropriate and the overall interview was very well crafted. It made me think deeply about the whole indie stuff. There were some things that I was not taking into account, specially from the strategic point of view. And I was not even aware of that. Trying to answer sincerely the questions of the interview made me realize about it.
I really think that was me who gained more from that conversation 🙂 Here you have the complete interview. Not too long 😉
In today’s post I would like to share with you my experience working on my first cross-platform game. Although it is intended to be available for Windows Phone, iOS and Android, currently I’m focused on the Windows Phone version.
The game is called Muster my Monsters (MmM). It is a two-player fighting monsters action game. It is a casual game, so game mechanics need to be simple and art appealing to most of people. Here you have a gameplay video.
Prototyping is a critical developing phase. During prototyping you may find design problems on your app that, if not detected early, would probably make you and your team waste an important amount of time.
There are a lot of techniques and tools to create prototypes. You can prototype on paper while brainstorming and use sophisticated tools later to create visually appealing prototypes.
However, I decided to use Keynote for prototyping my last client app Aduho Mirror. In today’s post I would like to share my reasons and experience.
Today’s post is an update for an old article about posting high scores to Facebook Wall. Some users have reported some issues about this class. There were some problems with the state control when authorization was needed.
Today I will like to post a new version of the class that solves these issues. The project is now called FacebookScorer and you can find it on GitHub.
