Beginning today until and including Dec 26th January 1st 2012 the Line-Drawing Game Starterkit is only $49,50 instead of $99,00 (50% off).
Just enter this coupon code when you make the purchase:
MERRYXMAS
Merry Xmas everyone - you deserve it! 
PS: I’ll be practically offline until the first week in January, but I’ll make sure to have a short iDevBlogADay post ready for you on Dec 29th.
Rob Appel from Hitapp.com has just released his game Launch Control on the App Store. The amazing thing about it, for me at least, is that it was made with my Line-Drawing Game Starterkit.
Make sure to check out the Launch Control website to get the full scoop and to get in touch with Rob. He was one of the first Starterkit customers back in July 2010 and now his game is finally complete and released, right in time before Xmas. Congratulations, Rob!
To celebrate the event, he gave me 10 promo codes for you …
Launch Control Promo Codes
W6AELL3WMHHM
N3RT3MEWKMYH
KRK74YENKWJ3
KAX9HFHXXX36
TKH6RJKW7XT7
ETAFL64HYTRH
YAJ9FPKJTMLY
AKFWJ7RW99Y4
FNTFEY9NWPJ6
T9TPH67WKA4H
Apple’s Promo Code Terms & Conditions:
Code expires on Thu Jan 13 13:09:36 PST 2011 and is redeemable only on the iTunes Store. Requires an iTunes account, subject to prior acceptance of license and usage terms. To open an account you must be above the age of 13. Compatible software and hardware, and internet access (fees may apply) required. Not for resale. Full terms apply; see www.apple.com/legal/itunes/ww/. For more information, see www.apple.com/support/. This app is provided to you by hitapp.com.
Line-Drawing Starterkit News
I’d like to take the opportunity and tell you about the latest news regarding the Line-Drawing Game Starterkit:
- The Line-Drawing Starterkit is now down from $179 to only $119 !
- It’s now compatible with Cocos2D v0.99.5
- Now includes Cocos2D for your convenience - this means it works out of the box
- You can ask pre-sales questions and get support on the Cocos2D Central forum
- Updates are also distributed through Cocos2D Central from now on
- Soon the Starterkit will also be sold directly on Cocos2D Central so that you automatically get access to the Starterkit forum and files (currently it’s a manual process)
You may wonder how the Starterkit includes Cocos2D but is less than 5 MB to download? The answer is simple: I removed all non-essential parts of the Cocos2D distribution to strip it down from 30 MB (zipped) to less than 2 MB (zipped). Almost all of the content that bloats the Cocos2D download are test cases and test assets which you don’t need for developing your own games.
You can download the stripped Cocos2D distribution from Cocos2D Central.
I’m pleased to announce that the Line-Drawing Game Starterkit is finally available for sale! It’s a source code project for anyone interested in developing a line-drawing game. The gameplay is modelled after the famous Flight Control game. The Starterkit works with the latest cocos2d v0.99.4 version and will at the very least receive compatibility upgrades for future cocos2d versions.
Hop on over to the product page to check out the feature list, the API documentation and a source code sample. You can also download the Starterkit App for iPhone from iTunes. The iPad Edition is still in approval.
Note: for the reminder of July 2010 you can get the Starterkit at an introductory price for only $179!
Positioning of the Starterkit
I’m sorry that you’ve had to wait one and a half months compared to the initially planned release date of June 1st. I double and triple checked every decision I made and you can see some of the results on the Starterkit product page.
I’ve also decided to increase the regular price from the initially intended $199 to $299 effective from August 1st, 2010. One of the reasons being that I initially planned to have multiple licenses including Indie and Commercial ones. I thought long and hard about positioning the Starterkit and eventually decided to sell only Site Licenses. For the individual developer it costs a bit more but for small and commercial teams it’s great news, and small teams and established, dedicated developers is who I am targeting. Those who really appreciate the value of commercial source code saving days and weeks of research and development, and all the trouble, sweat and pain associated with it. And I’m here to help if you have any questions regarding the Starterkit’s source code.
I don’t have plans to make another Starterkit and in all likelihood it will remain the only commercial cocos2d-related product for the remainder of this year.
Book Chapter about Line-Drawing Games
For those who are disappointed about the new price, either grab the Starterkit before August 1st or wait until December for the Learn iPhone and iPad Cocos2D Game Development book I’m writing. It will contain a chapter covering some of the basic aspects of a line-drawing game but without the finer details and complex interactions conveyed in the Starterkit. It’ll be Chapter 12 so in about 8 weeks (Mid-September) I’ll mention it in my weekly book chapter posts.
Closed Sales Period, Summary of
And here’s for transparency: exactly 10 days ago I informed the 668 subscribers of my Newsletter of the closed sales period. The password-protected Starterkit product page received just over 200 unique visitors. During the last 10 days I made 9 sales amounting to about $1,530 with Plimus’ 5% fee already deducted but obviously before tax. All sales were made within the first 4 days after I sent the Newsletter and for the last 6 days sales were absolutely zero. Although I’ve been in contact with several interested parties who didn’t want to or simply couldn’t buy it right now for various reasons. If you’re one of them: you’ll get it for $179 no matter when you make the purchase, just contact me beforehand.
Right now I’m curious to see how sales will be now that the Starterkit is publicly available.
Starterkit Promotion
I’d appreciate if you would tweet and re-tweet this post and mention the Starterkit to all fellow cocos2d-sians! If you would even go so far as writing a serious and honest review on your blog, please get in touch with me.
Just don’t test the waters by mentioning the Starterkit in the cocos2d community forum.
Stance Lance
I wish Ricardo had taken the time to be considerate and then talked to me instead of running off making an assumptive, excessive, and for the most part irrelevant (off-topic) stance post which only served to cause a big commotion among his community while allowing his forum rule “Treat people with respect.” to become a farce.
In Conclusion
In hindsight I’m glad that the whole thing got me thinking in so many new directions. Most importantly it got me in contact with a lot of developers who consciously don’t post on the cocos2d forum. To get those encouraging words and positive feedback and gaining interesting insights from other developer’s perspectives - especially those who tag along silently - really helped me understand the cocos2d development community better. Thank you, you know who you are!
The whole shebang also served as a great motivational factor to pour my everything into the cocos2d book, which came at just the right time to let off steam in just the right way. I’m writing it to be the cocos2d documentation it deserves and the one I always wished it had. I can’t even begin to describe how satisfying it feels to write this book. So much in fact that it hurts to stop writing every time I reach the 27 pages each chapter is expected to have.
Line-Drawing Game Starterkit
Site License! Unlimited Apps!Royalty Free! No Attribution!60 day money-back guarantee!Made with the popular cocos2d-iphone game engine.Compatible with cocos2d-iphone v1.1 and v2.0, Xcode 4.6 and iOS 6.Includes ARC enabled versions of the starterkit! |
All Starterkit project artwork provided by Arezou Ipakchi Design. Promotional images created by Justin from CartoonSmart.
What it is:
Get a head-start for your Line-Drawing game and save days if not weeks of your time! You’ll get gameplay code modelled after the extremely popular Flight Control game. You’ll learn how to draw lines, detect touches on objects, have objects follow a path - and much, much more! Written by a professional game developer and game industry veteran (me) the source code is annotated with lots of comments explaining my rationale and written with readability in mind.
Contains separate iPhone & iPad targets!
The Starterkit includes targets for iPhone and iPad using the same code if you don’t want to create a Universal app, for example to reduce your app’s size or to be able to charge more for the iPad version. If the iPad Target is selected hi-res iPad images will be used. Image selection is done automatically by loading those images whose filenames have the “-ipad” suffix, the same suffix cocos2d uses.
What others are saying:
“Code is quite clearly written and decently documented […] definitely a fine investment.”
From: Commercial cocos2d Code review from Alex Curylo.
“It was an awesome moment when I found the source for a line draw game of this caliber.”
-Franklin Lyons, SpinFall
“Especially the path and movement system is saving me lots of headaches.”
-Martin Hoffmann
Games made with this Starterkit:
Launch Control
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Ferries HD
Feature List:
- cleanly seperated and well-structured GameScene code design with a minimum of dependencies
- easy to add new objects and extend object parameters
- touch object & draw a path for it (whether it’s already following a path or not)
- path drawing ends when path is drawn over appropriate target location (eg airstrip for airplanes, respecting angle of approach)
- path drawing ends when arbitrary point limit is exceeded (to avoid slowdowns)
- path is drawn when dragged with thick transparent line style like Harbor Master, without glitches
- path is split into equal length pieces no matter how quickly user moves finger
- objects spawn outside screen, locations can be re-defined and extended
- objects display incoming warning marker at screen border
- objects display collision warning when any two of them are getting too close
- objects follow path to end - then fade out and increase score or continue moving
- objects always rotate in movement direction
- objects bounce back at screen borders
- motivational Labels for successful landings, precached
- Score and HighScore Labels
- HighScore saved to disk between play sessions
- supports both Landscape orientations with autorotation
- loads correct resource files depending on Target (iPhone or iPad)
- proper Pause handling for incoming calls, SMS
- many generally useful Math Helper functions included
- lots of comments explaining rationale and giving tips for improvement
- assertive coding style to help catch coding errors early on
- offline and online documentation
- you can choose between using cocos2d-iphone v1.1 and v2.0
- you can choose between using ARC or classic manual reference counting
- compatible with iOS 5.0 and newer, including iOS 6
- compatible with Xcode 4.6 (the most recent versions also work)
- easy setup: just unzip, open Xcode project, select build scheme, build and run
Questions? Need Help?
Just send me an email.
Legal Disclaimer
Cocos2D is a registered trademark of Ricardo Quesada. Steffen Itterheim, the Learn & Master Cocos2D website and the Line-Drawing Game Starterkit are neither affiliated with nor endorsed by Zynga or Ricardo Quesada.
Try Before Buy!
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Demo App for iPhone
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Buy Now!
Site License! Unlimited Apps!Royalty Free! No Attribution!60 day money-back guarantee!Made with the popular cocos2d-iphone game engine.Compatible with cocos2d-iphone v1.1 and v2.0, Xcode 4.6 and iOS 6.Includes ARC enabled versions of the starterkit! |
License Agreement
Copyright
Purchase grants you the License to use and modify the source code and assets under the following Terms and Conditions:
You are not allowed to make the source code publicly available. You are not allowed to give or sell the source code to others, modified or not. Licenses are not transferable.
All Licenses are royalty free. You can make as many free or commercial Apps using the source code as you want. You may re-use any existing assets in your App.
If you do contract work and have or want to give the Starterkit source code to your client, your client needs to purchase a Site License as well.
Site License
Each purchase grants you a Site License. The Site license grants you the use of the Starterkit without restrictions at one site.
A site is an office, building or living space rented or owned by the company or individual making the purchase. It allows anyone working on site to use and modify the Starterkit source code.
Large companies operating at several sites need to purchase a site license for each individual location if the Starterkit is to be used at multiple locations. Contact me if you’re such a corporation and you prefer a flat fee license with your own license text to go along with it.
Support
Updates to the Starterkit are done on an as needed basis. I will also keep it up to date and running with the latest stable releases of cocos2d. Updates are distributed via a download link sent to the email address you used for your order. If your email address ever changes please contact me, ideally you should forward me your order confirmation in that case to speed up the change.
Source Code not covered by this License
The licensed Source Code project contains files which are available for free and are governed by different licenses. The Terms & Conditions outlined here do not apply to source code files which do not contain the Copyright notice “Copyright (year) Steffen Itterheim. All rights reserved.”.
Disclaimer
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND ANY EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE REGENTS OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
Questions? Contact me!
If you have any questions or if you require specific License texts before making a purchase, please contact me.
On May 27th, the whole world saw the future. Because i told you so!
Line-Drawing Game Starterkit -> June 1st!
What’s that you ask?
It is the ideal starting point for your own Line-Drawing game! (like Flight Control and Harbor Master) It is a cocos2d source code project that will be available for sale. But not sight unseen, no. It will appear on the App Store for you to try out. And you get more, the full doxygen-generated source code documentation is available for browsing right now! Just so that you can assess the scope of the project.
What will it cost?
I admit i haven’t decided on that yet.
Show me your license!
Alright, alright. I’ll be fair: Free lifetime upgrades! Unlimited number of developers!
Each license is good for one published game. Additional licenses for follow-up games come at a discount. “Lite” versions do not require an extra license since they are essentially the same game. There will also be a commercial license for developers or studios who make more than $6,000 per month in revenue and can easily afford a higher price.
Why, please tell me why?
Because i can. I like technology and i like programming games. I’m also an enabler and i would love to see others build something unique based on game development technology i provide.
Anything else?
Yes. Today sees the premature end of the best new show of last year. RIP Flash Forward.
If you think your game suffers tremendeously from App Store Piracy, you’re wrong. To put it bluntly: your game has simply failed on the market!
Reports that put the App Store piracy rates at “at least 60%” and developers reporting piracy rates of 80% and even up to 95% are mathematically correct but what they often forget to tell you are actual sales numbers. In the rare cases where Indie developers also mention how many sales they have made, pirates or not, these numbers are always extremely low. For a commercial developer who reports an 80% piracy rate on one of his games it’s simply an attempt to turn terrible sales into a PR story which might give their game a little bit more attention. In fact, i expect the games who report piracy rates of over 30% to have sold no more than 5,000 copies. At $.99 this creates a revenue of $3,500 - maybe a good number for a two-man team but a catastrophe for a commercial developer. This is hardly a problem caused by piracy but a simple failure of the product on the market.
What you have to understand about Software Pirates in general: they use a lot of software. In fact, this is their hobby and favorite passtime, to try out as much software as they can get their hands on. So you will always have a minimum amount of pirated copies of each piece of software, no matter how successful this software is (or not). Of course, with higher success and more sales of the software more pirates are also likely to use it because they, too, value quality software. But given the amount of jailbroken iPhone devices prepared to run pirated software there’s a hard cap of the maximum amount of piracy you will ever see on any title. Just as much as there will be a minimum number of pirates playing every game as soon as it becomes available and regardless of how successful it is on the App Store. If your sales are close or below that minimum number of pirates, you naturally get piracy rates of over 50%. These pirates don’t cut into your revenue however. Ignore them. They never would have bought your App in the first place!
David Rosen from Wolfire reports in his Another View on Piracy article that the highest number of Jailbroken iPhones worldwide is said to be 10%, and in the USA - whose users constitute about two thirds of the iPhone/iPod market - the number of jailbroken devices is just 5%. Assuming a total installed base of 75 Million iPhones (50 Mio. as of April 2010) and iPod touches (20 Mio. as of Sept. 2009) we get at most 7.5 Mio jailbroken devices worldwide, or approximately 2.5 Mio jailbroken devices in the USA. They are not all pirates, however. PinchMedia reports that 38% of jailbroken devices have run at least one pirated App. They also state this number is low. So let’s just take half and we’ll end up with 3.75 Mio. jailbroken devices worldwide which have run at least one pirated App. Still a pretty high number - but it only tells us that they have started one pirated App but not how many or how much of a pirate these users really are. If i had to guess i would say that 10% or just about 400,000 of these users are active pirates who try out a lot of Apps on an almost daily basis. These are the pirates who make the biggest impact in terms of per-App piracy numbers. They are also the users who are least likely to upgrade their pirated copy to a legal one, if they ever do it at all. And trying to fight these pirates is anything but futile - they will never be your customers!
PinchMedia also supports my theory that most Pirates try out as much Software as they can which, of course, leaves less time to use each App intensely: “Pirated applications are used less frequently, less intensely, and for a shorter overall length of time than purchased applications.”
Let’s go back to the gist of it: developers who have a problem with App Store Piracy have, in my opinion, either a problem of perception or they’re making a simple PR statement aimed at getting them more attention, hoping to achieve better sales. The developers who suffer most from App Store Piracy are those who simply are not successful. Their real problem isn’t Piracy, it’s much more likely that they failed either at Marketing, Timing, Quality or finding their Target Audience.
Let me sum this up with a simple chart which i think explains why App Store developers report amazingly high piracy rates, when in fact they are reporting the commercial failure of their App:
I keep running into posts where users ask how fast cocos2d is, or why their particular code is slow.
I compiled a procedures checklist that you should go through before reporting performance issues.
I also tried to explain why the question of how fast cocos2d is has no real-world relevance.
Then i added a link to All-Seeing Interactive’s cocos2d Performance Tips as this is such a great post! It covers a lot of topics:
- Profiling with Instruments
- Testing on different devices
- Textures and Texture Atlases
- Speeding up loading times
- Reducing memory usage
- Flipping textures
- Pixel formats
- PVRTC (Texture Compression)
- CCSpriteSheet
- Pre-render programatically generated textures
- Avoid using atomic accessors
- Read the best practices documentation
As always i hope you find these additions help- and useful.
Bad user reviews and comments can actually be a good thing
Bad reviews, or simply trash talking and bad-mouthing, can have a positive effect on your game, and yourself. Don’t be overly concerned if some idiots voice their BS and drag down your review score. If you value what you do and others see that value, the positive effect of some bad rep is simply that it encourages others to voice their opinion in favor of the product and you. The things you should not do, however, is to be overly protective and try to remove such posts. That will only serve to earn you disrespect from everyone because freedom of speech is a much higher value. If disrespected, it will earn you much more disrespect in return. If you’re in doubt whether what’s been said is offensive, keep it online until someone complains. The more absurd and unreasonable negative comments are the more happier should be, and you’ll quickly notice other users jumping in to make their case. You, on the other hand, should stay out of it. React to the positive comments, ignore the bad-mouthing and trash-talking that is only targeted to lure you out in the open.
Applied to the App Store, where you have no control over the bad reviews other than complaining about them in your blog: don’t do it. No one cares about your whining on bad reviews. They happen. If your game is really good, it will get good reviews. The bad ones will only serve to encourage others to post their opinion and they often provide good reasons not to listen to “those jerks”. The other bad reviews which are clearly not from idiots you should hold dearly. They contain valuable criticism about your product. It will help you improve. Nothing is more powerful than a dissatisfied customer or someone who was simply disappointed which you were able to turn to your side by listening and reacting to their criticism. People love to criticize, but even more so they love when someone is actually listening and making changes in their favor.
Caveat: some people will always criticize no matter what. And some will always know how to make things even better. Those are the kind of people who could sway you into feature-creep, don’t listen to them, they’ll kill your product the more you try to make it theirs. And some will be jerks for live and just randomly change their opinions on a daily basis, probably based on what they heard or read today, or whether they were drinking or not, or whether today’s weather is good or bad. Listen only to the feedback that is voiced most often, which others agree on and which is consistent.