Following up on the Development Post-Mortem I wrote for our new iOS game, I wanted to give a quick look into how our marketing push was planned and how the first few weeks of sales went. Though I am a coder first, I have many spare cycles in my brain to approach the business side of things, and I knew I didn’t want to neglect the marketing and promotion side of the app. A failure to launch is many times cited as a source of frustration of independent developers and I wanted to give my new game a fair shot […]
For four or the five months, I have been working on Operation: Eradicate, an iOS turn based strategy game. With my graphics designer, we at Skejo Studios have revisited the last few months, and wanted to write about the highs and lows, and lessons learned for next time. First I wanted to start with our initial hoped for timeline: Initial Timeline * Sept 2011 – Start * Oct 2011 – Code fleshed out and Art assets started, first round done * Nov 2011 – Dev and art near finish, start beta testing * Dec 2011 – Wrap up loose ends, […]
Since we are developing a strategy game for the iPad/iPhone at Skejo Studios, we were in need of an in game help system to quickly tutor the player with the different controls and game options. We had been putting off this mechanism for a while, since it was figured it might take a while, but surprisingly it was rather easy in Cocos2d to accomplish. Game Layer Code I am assuming you know how to add the correct definitions and import class headers, so I am not showing that part. Placing the below code in your init method for the Cocos2d […]
Running in the game dev circles for the last three months has exposed me to a ton of one or two man shops that undertake the entire development and production of a game on their own. Some are doing well, but others are struggling. It almost seems like some developers purposely handicap themselves by ‘doing it all’ just so they can claim the elusive ‘indie developer’ mantel. I don’t want to touch the What is an indie game developer? topic again, but I do want to target the thinking behind doing it all yourself. Is going it alone wise, productive, […]
In one of my projects, while I waited for some art work, I wanted to get ahead with my Game Center integration. This tutorial is about how to get Achievements to be displayed in the Game when the achievement is sent to Game Center. I will further explore how to get the achievement images also included. A few simple frameworks will be used. Also, I am taking it for granted that Game Center is up and running on your app. I was able to get it up and running in a few hours using the methods found in Learning Cocos2D […]
I was toying with the idea of writing a post about why I went independent, but I figure that wasn’t appropriate for the wider audience of iDevBlogADay.com. Check my blog for those posts. So I decided to post a more technical piece regarding cocos2d menus and how to pass arguments through the Cocos2d menu system. But I was facing two issues. One I hated rewriting similar code over and over again. Second to make menu items more reusable, I needed to be able to pass arguments to the selector of the menu, which wasn’t readily apparent how to do this. […]
When I was making the transition into iOS development from Internet engineering, I grabbed two 500 page iPhone app development books, read and worked the examples over a Christmas vacation, coded nights and weekends for three months and produced an app that Apple highlighted as New and Noteworthy, the Dog Park Finder. So, now when I decided to make the leap from iOS development to iOS game development 18 months later, I wanted to grab a great intro book and go from there. First I had to determine the tools I would use, and landed upon Cocos2D (this isn’t a […]
