A presentation about KoboldScript with a demonstration of a Tic Tac Toe game with Scene changes and transitions. You’ll see more KoboldScript code and learn more about its key concepts in this episode.
Episode #7 – Tic Tac To Lua
• KoboldScript Demo #2
o Tic Tac Toe
o Presentation
• iDevBlogADay: Donations
• Angry Ninjas Starterkit
So you have this website going or some source code on github, and like to earn a few bucks. Donations, right? Hold on, there are a couple things you should consider before you add that Donate button!
UPDATE: If you prefer a concise, to the point summary of this post, you should read the follow-up post The 10 Golden Rules for a Donate Button.
In case you haven’t noticed, you won’t find a Donate button here or on my other websites. It may seem strange that the guy who never had a donation button of all people should write a guide to the donation button.
I consciously decided against having a donation button. You’ll find a number of reasons in this post, and maybe at the end of it you come to agree with me that Donate buttons are over-used, and the more developers offer them the fewer donations reach those developers who actually need and/or deserve donations the most.
I also wrote this as guidance particularly for individual indie or open source developers who are accepting donations or considering to do so, because donating to an individual is fundamentally different than donating to a (charitable) organisation or a software project (team) as a whole. You will also get some ideas on how you can improve your donation acceptance rate and which alternatives for voluntary compensation and appreciation exist.
Rule Number 1: Be a charity or a business. Never both!
I sell commercial products, both my own and third party products for which I receive a commission fee for each sale. I am self-employed, I make my living from those products and a few select contract jobs for people I know personally. It is fair to say that I’m running a business.
For me the question of whether I should ask for donations boils down to this: should a business be asking for and accepting donations? Continue reading »
Justin Dike over at CartoonSmart.com created an awesome Starter Kit for creating Sling Shot games like Angry Birds, using cocos2d-iphone.
Click on the image to view the product page with more details:
I should mention that I get a commission fee for each CartoonSmart.com sale. In other words I highly appreciate every sale because it helps me to keep this website running and to continue improving Kobold2D.
In this episode of LearnCocosTV I demonstrate how to write and animate a Cocos2D scene with KoboldScript.
KoboldScript is more than just writing the same Cocos2D code but with a scripting language. Most other scripting language bindings for game engines simply translate the game engine’s C/C++/Objective-C API 1:1 (more or less) without introducing new concepts, adding more comfort by simplifying common tasks, or utilizing the powerful features of whatever the scripting language has to offer.
KoboldScript goes three steps further than that – one by tightly integrating the setup of scenes via defining the node properties in a tool-friendly tree structure (Lua table) that you can both write manually or create programmatically using Lua’s built-in features.
Two, by using Statemachines to drive game logic while also providing free Lua scripting via user-specified Lua callback functions. And three, by adding a (MVC-ish) component system with re-usable abilities and behaviors to all Cocos2D nodes.
Unfortunately I ran out of time at the end so I couldn’t even say goodbye. I hope you don’t mind.
Episode #6 – One Small Script for Man …
• KoboldScript Demonstration
o How to create Scenes with Sprites, etc
o How Abilities & Behaviors work
• iDevBlogADay: Asynchronous Texture Loading
o Cocos2D Webcam Viewer speedup
I updated the Cocos2D Webcam Viewer project from a previous article to download a file from the web asynchronously, and then load its texture asynchronously as well. You can now switch between the two modes to see how asynchronous operations almost completely removed the pauses the app experiences in synchronous mode. Just tap the screen to switch modes.
Continue reading »
To visualize the lag I added a constantly moving sprite at the bottom. This makes the lag easier to spot than a framerate counter. I also removed all error checking code from this article to make the code easier to read. As always you can find the Cocos2D Webcam Viewer source code with full error checking on the LearnCocos2D github repository.
Kobold2D v1.0.4 is available from the Kobold2D Download page!
I’m terribly sorry for the hiccup with v1.0.3. There was an absolute path causing build failures for others, which of course worked on my systems so I didn’t catch it. I retracted v1.0.3 shortly after publishing it. The fixed version is now v1.0.4. If you happen to have downloaded v1.0.3 I recommend to upgrade to v1.0.4 right away.
The most important improvements in this version are Xcode 4.3 compatibility and working around a “file not found ../libkobold2d-ios.a” issue caused by the Xcode 4 Build Location setting “Locations Specified by Targets” (in Xcode 4.3 this setting is now appropriately named “Legacy”).
The Release Notes lists all the changes. Continue reading »
I thought I’d post a very early result of the KoboldScript scene setup. This scene was scripted entirely with KoboldScript with about 50 lines of code:
Below you’ll see the part of the Lua script that created this scene. In fact it’s not so much code as it is defining data, which behind the scenes calls the node functions like setPosition and setColor for you. Continue reading »










