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

Continue reading

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

Continue reading

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

Continue reading

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

Continue reading

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

Continue reading

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

Continue reading

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

Continue reading

Time distribution on game development

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

Time distribution of tasks on New Sokoban development process

Continue reading

Using sprite sheets in Cocos2d and Tiled (part 2)

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

Vegeta Sprite Sheet

Continue reading