Today’s post is going to be short (hope so). Basically I would like to announce that finally New Sokoban is officially available on the App Store!!! 😀 It has been a long and hard way, but finally, my own first iOS game is out.
New Sokoban, my own first iOS game, has been submitted to Apple and is waiting for review 🙂 So, this week I have been very busy preparing all the marketing machine to be ready for the international launch, which I hope will be next thursday 🙂 But I have also been making some project evaluation. Since I started the development of New Sokoban I have been registering every day the tasks accomplished and the working hours. So, in today’s post I would like to show you how the chart looks like and share some conclusions.
Time distribution of tasks on New Sokoban development process
Today’s post is the second part of last week post about using sprite sheets with cocos2d and Tiled. In the previous post we saw what is a sprite sheet, how to to create it from a collection of individual sprites using Texture Packer and how to code it using cocos2d for iPhone. Today I’m going to explain how I used sprite sheets as source libraries in Tiled to create and edit New Sokoban puzzles. In this previous post I partially covered this topic. However, today I’m going to enter in more detail into some technical issues.
As we saw in the first part of this article, sprite sheets are mainly used to drastically improve our games performance in terms of both memory and CPU usage. We basically need to group our original individual sprites and then have some way to refer to them in our game code.
Vegeta Sprite Sheet
In today’s post I’m going to enter in more detail in a very useful topic for game development: Sprite Sheets. I introduced this topic in two of my previous post, but did not enter in detail. I received some feedback pointing out that there is some interest on sprite sheets and how to use them in conjunction with Texture Packer and Cocos2d. In addition, I’m also going to explain how to use sprite sheets as your source library for creating maps on Tiled. This will probably be a large post, so I’m going to split it into two parts.
Super Mario World Sprite Sheet
Today’s post is going to be a pragmatic and technical one. I’m going to make a brief introduction to Game Center integration for your games. I decided to talk about this topic today because I found some things that I was not expecting about Game Center. So, I going to share my experience.
As you may know, Game Center is Apple’s solution to social gaming experience. It’s not the best social gaming experience, but its acceptance has been very high among iOS users and it’s quite easy to implement. That’s why I finally decided to only support Game Center, forgetting about Open Feint or Plus+.
I think that today’s post is a necessary one. I have had it at the pending list since quite weeks ago. Today I’m going to explain the process of puzzle creation for New Sokoban.
Last Friday 18th of March was a clear milestone in my professional live. I was invited to give a little talk at devUp11 in Barcelona (Spain). The talk was, obviously, about New Sokoban 🙂 This article is going to be my personal story about the devup11.
Today’s post is the second part of an article about target audience and its implications on the development and commercialization of your app or game on the AppStore. You can find the first part here. In this second part I’m going to try to apply the theoretical concepts discussed on the first part onto my current project New Sokoban.
We talked about that it is important to fix the target audience of your game or app. And we also talked about that it is extremely difficult for your initial projects to do so… So, I’m doing my best 🙂 Anyway, I decided that I would like that the target audience for New Sokoban would be mainly casual. The reasons for that are mainly two: (1) casual gamers are the most and this means more potential downloads. (2) My family and friends are mainly casual gamers or even non gamers. Therefore, working on a casual game allowed me to receive more valuable feedback in early stages of development. Some years ago, I worked on a hardcore project (not for my own) and it was really frustrating to talk about that to family and friends and notice that they were not really interested on that, despite on their efforts to simulate interest. So, this time I realized that I needed all the support I could get and this also inclined me to start a casual game project.
In today’s post I’m going to talk about a quite tricky topic: target audience and its implications on the development and commercialization of your app or game on the AppStore. First of all I would like to clarify that I’m not by no means an expert about this topic. Everything I’m going to say is based on my experience with paintingWalls and New Sokoban. So, comments on this post will be specially appreciated 🙂
Probably when you start your first project that is intended to be published you don’t think about your target audience seriously. You probably focus on creating a great app or game and assume that this will be enough to reach mass market. Usually this is not true. Usually you need to create a great app for your target audience. And that implies that you need to fix or select your target audience first.
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.
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.
