Tag Archives: game development

Guest post: Making Objecty an app for 2D game developers: The short story version

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Hey there,

So Toni has let me write a guest blog post so I thought I would share with you a little of my experience over the last year and a half. I will also post this on my own blog for future reference!

My name is Jon and I run a small indie game company called SKN3. I do the majority of the work at SKN3 with assistance from a few others for certain tasks. We are a new company running just over a year and we are excited to show you what we have been doing.

I have been creating games since I can remember, whether it be a text adventure on a vic20 or a snake clone written on a Psion PDA (remember them?). I love making games; it gives you such freedom to create an idea that can eventually be enjoyed over and over. However there is one part of making games that I find incredibly tedious; getting your content into them!

Objecty

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Exporting Flash Animations to Cocos2d Actions

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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.

Exporting Flash Animations to Cocos2d Actions

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Gamelab 2012. Bigger and better

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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.

gamelab

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AppCircus Dev Day Barcelona 2012

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“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.

AppCircus Dev Day Barcelona 2012

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Game Theory Applied: Endogenous Value

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Today’s article is the third one in the series “Game Theory Applied”. You have the previous two here:

In the previous two articles I talked about game design aspects that I think that were well addressed in New Sokoban. However, today I’m going to talk about a very difficult and tricky topic that should be better applied to New Sokoban: endogenous value in games.

Endogenous Value

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Game Theory Applied: A Layered Game Rewards System

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Today’s article is the second one in the series “Game Theory Applied”. You can find the first article of the series here. Today I would like to talk about game rewards, and how I applied them on New Sokoban.

Game rewards are a very important concept in game design. Actually, in some sense, players play games to be rewarded. It is a human need. Players need to be evaluated favorably. That’s why a well designed and balanced game rewards system is key in any game, even for the simplest one.

Layered Game Rewards System

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Game Theory Applied: The Flow Channel

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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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