Using sprite sheets in Cocos2d and Tiled (part 1)

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

Super Mario World Sprite Sheet

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Game Center integration – leaderboards and achievements

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+.

game center icon

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Tools for creating a game

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.

Development

Xcode

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.

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