Mohammad Azam is working on a serious of Tutorials with the goal to write a complete iPhone game, called Space Demon. You can view a demonstration of the game here:
So far, the Tutorial has 3 parts:
This one is for the “techies” among you who would like to know about low-level performance specs of the iOS devices. Maybe you’ve heard of Mike Ash before? He’s a Mac programmer who writes about his profession on a weekly basis and Mike’s development blog is well worth browsing for highly interesting material. Back in March 2008 he published one of the first iPhone performance comparison for common operations.
Stuart Carnie then took this performance comparison and updated it with results for iPhone 4 and iPad, and published them in his Micro-Benchmarking blog post along with the source code. If you’re interested to learn how long it takes to perform a floating point division or a 1 MB memcopy across several iOS devices, these are the tests you were looking for.
Nikita Gazarov is the developer of Chopper Defense HD for iPad, a fast-paced Tower Defense meets Arcade game … type of game. Hard to describe, better see for yourself:
For the Linkvent Calendar he wrote two articles about gameplay usability. In his first post Virtual Controls Usability he describes the dual-stick implementation he used in Chopper Defense, and what the problems and solutions to that were. In his second post he goes into detail about The Sins of Accelerometer Controls, as experienced in games like Fly Effect Real 3D while Tilt to Live does almost everything correctly.
How did they make the animated water in the background of Wheeler’s Treasure? That’s probably a question you’ve never asked yourself but it’s in fact a very interesting process that one of the developers explains in this video:
The original post on the Two Lives Left blog, dubbed: The cool effect that no one noticed includes the download of the water texture.
Continuing with yesterday’s Box2D Car demo I’d like to stay on the topic of Box2D and present to you the Tilemap based Box2D world put together by theTconcept, a website hosted by a group of italian and mexican designers, writers and coders.
In their tutorial they explain how to create Box2D collisions from a Tiled Map Editor world, by using the object group layer. The one you can use to place arbitrary rectangles on in Tiled. The resulting Xcode project is available for download.
Today’s Linkvent Calendar entry comes from David Sutoyo. His second Cocos2D game, Balloon Ride, was published on the App Store on Dec 1st. David took some time to write a postmortem about making Balloon Ride. He starts out by saying that programming in Objective-C is hard, game design is even harder but marketing is the hardest part. However, he concludes that the overall design process is fun and he is now toying with the idea of using Corona because programming in Lua is simpler than Objective-C.
David also wrote a mini-postmortem about his first Cocos2D game Memory Flash.
Watch the Balloon Ride gameplay video:
