The Festival of Games 2013 in Amsterdam …..
by aeonphyxius on May.07, 2013, under News
As an indie game developer it was time to attend my first video games development conference. Together with @stilghar_ and representing our small indie studio @2awesomestudio we have attended this amazing conference, the 2013 Festival of Games in Amsterdam #FoG13. We have met a lot of cool people, another indie developers, companies, etc. You can find extensive comments about it at our studio web page here. You can find there our thoughts about #fog13 , some keynotes about the speakers we have attend ….and even some pictures !!!!!!
I really enjoyed all the talks given there from different industry professionals and the indie games development conference on the second day. Meeting a lot of small studios developers gave me the strength to continue my efforts developing the Hot Air balloons game, and Dimension Jumper. Also I will review my old projects as Aeon Space Fighter to clean up a little bit this projects. Last but not least important, I will develop a small group of games as a “prove of concept”, with clean structure and code.
How to force an object to stay in the visible camera area in Unity
by aeonphyxius on Mar.10, 2013, under Technical posts, Unity3D
Imagine that you are developing certain game that needs an object to stay in the camera’s visible area. For example a vertical space shooter where we would like to have our space ship to stay all the time in the visible area.
Let’s imagine that our player is free to move the space ship all around the screen, shooting enemies, collecting items, etc. Of course we would like to force our player to stay within the game screen when approaching the borders. As there are many devices with different screen resolutions, will make impossible to handle all of them manually. Then our first step will be get the screen resolution in order to calculate the borders. Let us say for this example that the player will be able to go maximum till 5% off the horizontal border and 10% off the vertical border.
XNA is dead ……. or at least discontinued from Microsoft
by aeonphyxius on Feb.10, 2013, under News
10 days ago, a bomb has impacted deeply in our little video game development world. Microsoft has confirmed that it does not plan to release future versions of the XNA, what means that XNA has been discontinued. A blog post from Promit Roy (you can read it here) and also some news at Gamasutra here and at wpcentral here confirm this point without an official communication from Microsoft.
I have been doing some mini projects with XNA over the last 4 years, and for the last 6 months, deeply involved in developing an indie game for XBLIG (Xbox Live Indie Games). This project is being ported now to Unity 3D, and definitely I will abandon XNA. I personally believe that Microsoft has shoot themselves on the feed with this movement, but without more information about future plans, I can’t evaluate the impact of this decision. XNA has created an easy way for indie developers to produce some quality games for XBLIG, highly promoted with the Dream Build Play awards. A huge community has grown over the years around this technology, with a lot of developers over the world enthusiastically contributing to the grown of XNA.
Last, I would like to share a comment I have seen around, and I beleive is how a lot of developers feel right now …. “Welcome to Unity…. don’t worry is warm in here”
How to load a cocos2d-x plist (configuration file) from C++
by aeonphyxius on Jan.14, 2013, under Cocos2d-x
In this post I will try to explain how to use this cocos2d-x functionality from our C++ code.
Sometimes we might need to load a configuration file with some information for our game. For instance, let’s imagine that we need to load the level background image file name, width and height. Of course we always can use a constant, local class var, … etc to store this information. But as your project grows, it will be difficult to remember where you have stored this var, or the name of it. To avoid it, a solution could be to store this information into a text file. Cocos2d-x provides a functionality for loading a XML “like” text file.
cocos2d-x tutorial part III – How to Move a sprite
by aeonphyxius on Sep.11, 2012, under Cocos2d-x
Now we already have created our first cocos2d game on Part I – Hello world , and adding our player’s sprite into game’s scene in the last chapter, Part II – How to Add a sprite. But now, like in many other games, we have to add some enemies in our screen, in order to play. Let’s suppose that we would like our enemies appearing into the screen from the right side, and moving from there to the left at a random position and speed. To do that, we will create a function called addTarget() as we will see below. Once more we are following the original tutorial posted here.
Let’s get started then……
cocos2d-x tutorial part II – How to Add a sprite
by aeonphyxius on Sep.06, 2012, under Cocos2d-x
After this tutorial part I – Hello world, now we already have created our first multi-platform cocos2d-2x project. Now is time to add an sprite to our small game.
As in the original tutorial that you can find here, we will be using these three images made by Ray Wenderlich ’s wife , which would be used into our little game.
Cocos2D 2x tutorials
by aeonphyxius on Aug.09, 2012, under News
I started to use the last version of cocos2d (cocos2d-2.0-rc2-x-2.0.1) recently. Cocos2d-X is a game engine framework based on Cocos2d-iPhone, which consists of expanding supported platforms, with multiple choice of programming languages that shares the same API structure. You can find more information about this engine on the official website here.
After following the beginners tutorials they have on the official web with no success as they are developed using the previous release of cocos2d. There are some parts that are not working anymore, and takes a bit of time to realize how to do them with the new release. I just decided to share my experience, and write a 7 part tutorial for beginners, just following the official ones, but adapted to this new release. You can find the links below:
Chapter 1 – Hello World
Chapter 2 – How to Add a sprite
Chapter 3 – How to Move a sprite
Chapter 4 – How to Fire some Bullets
Chapter 5 – How to Detect the Collisions
Chapter 6 – How to Play Music and Sound Effect
Chapter 7 – Some Icing on the Cake
cocos2d-x tutorial part I – Hello world
by aeonphyxius on Aug.09, 2012, under Cocos2d-x
This is the first post from a small cocos2d-x step by step tutorial following the official ones. After following them with no success as they are developed using the previous release of cocos2. There are some parts that are not working anymore, and takes a bit of time to realize how to do them with the new release. This tutorials can be found on the web official web here. From now on, I will publish the remaining6 parts (out of 7) following the same contents as the official ones, but adjusted for the current version of cocos2d-x. (continue reading…)
Two new projects for Android
by aeonphyxius on Aug.06, 2012, under News
Today I come with some news about two new projects for Android.
The first project is called Aeon Space Fighter. Over the last months I have developed an Android space arcade game natively for Android. This was my first incursion into Android development, and you can find more details, source code and Google Play link here.
The second project I am working on is a game for smartphones using cocos2d. Recently a colleague and myself present an idea to Ultramagic International Innovation Awards, being selected for the final phase from about 200 proposals. Now we are developing a demo of our idea using the mentioned technology. This will allow me to write a tutorial of cocos2d 2 for beginners. As I have found some difficulties to find one about the latest release of cocos2d, I decided to write one.
Project – “Aeon Space Figther”
by aeonphyxius on Aug.06, 2012, under Android
This is my first work on game development for smartphones. I have choose Android over Iphone ( or any other mobile platform) because of a simple reason …. I already have an Android device of my own (Samsung Galaxy SII). (continue reading…)
