Category: Cocos2d-iPhone

  • Cocos2D-Swift 3.0: A great way to get started developing iOS games!

    If you’re new to iOS game development now is a great time to get started. In 2008 a brilliant engineer named Ricardo Quesada rewrote his 2D game engine for Apple’s iOS and released it as open source. It’s no exaggeration to say that hundreds of games, like my own, were developed using Cocos2D-including dozens of…

  • Re-doing Dungeonators

    One thing I think all software developers love to do is to make software for “the heck of it.” Hacking something together without having to worry about users, open source community members, and code reviews, is something devs don’t get to do often in these days of test-driven, agile, minimum viable products. Back in 2011…

  • ARC Memory Management in iOS 5 and Cocos2d-iPhone 2.0

    My rewrite of Dungeonators is crawling along at a glacial pace. Mostly because I can only work a couple of hours a week on the project. But the iOS 5 way to manage memory with ARC (automated reference counting) is making the process far less painful than it was the first time I wrote my…

  • Dungeonators Battle UI Redesign

    There is nothing quite like real user feedback. The Dungeonators game that I started coding about a year ago has been through several design iterations. Before I wrote a line of code I mocked up the whole UI and tested that on my friends and kids (paper prototype, an honorable UI design tradition). And with…

  • Sprite Playground

    I wrote a little Cocos2d-iPhone test app and committed the project to GitHub. (Like every dutiful hacker should.) You’re welcome to download the project and fool around with the code. My goal was to figure out how to create a composite sprite, make sure it could respond to touches, and rotate and move it round…

  • Cocos2d-iPhone Sprite Rotation to an Arbitrary Point

    I had some time during the Thanksgiving weekend to work on Dungeonators. I’m hoping to get an upgrade out to the App Store soon. One thing I needed //TODO: is refactor my rather poor implementation of rotating a sprite to face another sprite. My original code worked ok, in a roundabout way, but was ugly…

  • Dungeonators iPhone Game Released in the App Store!

    Writing a real game, from scratch, in Objective-C, with original Art and sound effects, took a heck of a lot longer than I imagined. Even with the help of the Cocos2d-iPhone framework! You can find it here:  http://bit.ly/rkZvCJ Here’s what the sprite atlas looks like (formatted by Zwoptex) … And here are some stats: 28…

  • Invalid Code Signing Entitlements

    Finally after 11 months I submitted my iPhone game, Dungeonators, to iTunes Connect for inclusion in the Apple App Store. I’m planning on giving it away so the “warcraft meets angry birds” funs is accessible to everyone! I hope it passes Apple’s review process 🙂 It took several attempts for me to get to “waiting…

  • Hey It’s Easier Than You Think (Xcode 4 and Subversion)

    I love how the new Xcode 4 shows you code changes side-by-side with it’s version editor view. But I had a little problem. I’m a subversion fan. Yes, I know, totally not cool. I keep this flaw a secret and I don’t force my preference on my co-workers nor do I tweet about it. I’m…

  • Cocos2d Tip#3: Making Your iPhone Game Fast

    My first iPhone game, that might actually make it to the App Store, is just about done. (Not done done but almost ready for testing and tweaking.) With the idea that other people beside me might actually play my game I’ve started to do a very dangerous and high risk activity: Optimization! The all the…