Launching Pad blog
How Zoo Lasso works, part one: looping
For a while now, I’ve been meaning to write a series of posts about how Zoo Lasso is put together internally, in the hope that it can help other budding iPhone developers. Some nice people on the cocos2d forums have been asking about the mechanics behind the loop drawing and animal grouping, so that seems a good place to start.
Note that the game use the rather fantastic cocos2d for iPhone, so the code relies heavily on that framework.
Some caveats:
- Before this project we had never done anything with the iPhone SDK, Objective-C or cocos2d. There are a lot of things I’d approach differently knowing what I know now.
- I’m very much still learning programming craft. There is plenty of bleeding between what should probably be separate model, view and controller code. (But writing about your messy code helps you write less messy code next time, right?
- My mathematical skills are weak, so don’t expect the World’s Most Efficient Algorithms.
With those in mind, read on!
Apologies to all our players
Update July 3rd, 2009: The full, sponsored version of the game is now both up on gamesgames.com and this very site. Go! Play! Enjoy!
Strange things have been afoot with The Pretender. We didn’t actually expect to become a finalist in the 2BeeGames Indie Game competition but somehow we did. Not realising that the finalists were now open to The Whole Internet, we went ahead and updated the game on the contest site to the latest version.
Now, when you’re looking for sponsorship for a Flash game, it’s very important that you’re able to offer your sponsor a period of exclusivity. That means not getting the game plastered all over the internet beforehand, right?
A little bit of crunch…
By the end of today, we’re hoping to have our new Flash version of The Pretender presentable enough to enter into the 2BeeGames Indie Game Competition. Are we going to make it by the deadline? I think so. We’ll certainly be calling our entry a ‘work in progress’, but at this stage it looks like the game (even incomplete) will hang together as a whole just fine. We’re pleased! I particularly like the artwork produced by the talented Vin Rowe.
The last two weeks have been gruelling; I’ve taken time off from my day job and have been working I-don’t-even-know-how-many hours a day coding and producing audio. Tristan has been devoting every last spare moment to design and writing, and Vin has been putting in a superhuman effort despite being desperately ill.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I despise the macho stay-up-all-night, work-until-you’re-a-burned-out-husk culture that has grown up around game development. It’s terribly wrong that some mainstream game studios have come to rely on months of crunch time. In fact, if games are — as some say — stuck in perpetual adolescence, perhaps the reason is that only a certain adolescent exuberance can get a developer through that many 16-hour days? I’m only mostly joking.
That said, over a shorter period, working your butt off to get something ready can be surprisingly rewarding. So yes, despite my headache from a relentlessly cooked brain, despite the housework piling up and despite the frozen meals my (amazingly supportive) wife and I have had to live off for the last week, it’s worth it because I get to see this game metamorphose from ‘fairly fun’ into ‘pretty special’. And that’s worth a little bit of hard work.
Welcome to The Pretender!
Our current game is nearing completion! So in honour of that, we thought we should start blogging again. Well, we’ll see how Tim gets on – he’s saddled with most of the end-game work, unfortunately. Perhaps he can recover his sanity in time to write a true post-mortem.
A fix for Test Movie’s low framerate in Flash CS3
We’ve often encountered a terribly low framerate when using Test Movie (Command-Enter or Ctrl-Enter) in Flash CS3. Strangely, the same .swf file would always play just fine using the external Flash Player application.
It turns out that the workaround for this is to call up the Flash help system (Help → Flash Help). Your Test Movie framerate will now be back at the correct rate. Bizarre, no?
Thanks to titohov at kirupaForum for this tip.
How we made Boots run more smoothly using cacheAsBitmap and object pools
Run Boots Run was created partly to help us make the transition to Flash and ActionScript from some other game toolkits that we’ve used in the past. There was a lot to learn even for such a simple game, and some of it has only become obvious now, a month after the initial release. These optimisation hints might be obvious to Flash experts, but read on if you’re an ActionScript newbie like me.
Fashion Star Postmortem
This is a blog about how I came to develop a game about dressing up in different outfits, and how it consumed 12 months of my life. Read all about what went well, what went terribly, and everything I learned from the experience!
A blog as well
Starting today, we’ll be posting blog entries in addition to our regular news articles.
Announcements and details about our games (past, present and future) will continue to go to the news page, just like you’d expect.
This blog will be a bit more personal, and we’ll attempt to chronicle our experience as indie game developers. There’s just two of us at the moment and we’re on a very tight budget. But good games can change the world, and we want to be a part of that. And we want to let you in on the highs and lows along the way.
