Today is Christmas Eve. The last day of the Cocos2D Linkvent Calendar. I’d like to make you a gift, but I can’t give to all of you, so it’s going to involve a little competition.
This is your chance to win an unsuspected present: the print edition of my book. And signed. With a dedication of your choosing. Shipping and handling is on me, and I’ll send it worldwide. As long as you give me the correct address it should get there in between a couple days or a few weeks, hopefully in January.
I have five copies to spare, so there will be five winners.
How do I win the book?
It’s simple. Make a comment on this post. Tell me why you would like the book sent to you.
Make sure to enter a valid e-mail address in the appropriate field, so I can contact you in case you’re a winner. Winners are those that I like best, for some arbitrary reason I don’t even know about yet until I’ve read your comments. I am the jury and the judge but I’ll give you a fair trial after due consideration, or I’ll just flip coins if I can’t decide. Surprise me with something. I’m not looking for something specific, or merely praise or jokes. You could tell me your story, sing a song, draw a picture, record a video of yourself cracking a coconut, post a link to your blog, bribe me (hey, who knows?). Just keep it appropriate and PG13 rated, please. 😉
Deadline
I’ll give you time to post your comment for the remainder of the year, until midnight on December 31st. If in doubt I’ll consider your local time.
You may remember
from 6th of December,
when I did promote
the BATAK Duel source-code.
Ok, ok, I hear you … enough of the rhymes. 
Dan Nelson has informed me that he is in the Xmas spirit for whatever reason (weird, right?), and that means for you that the price of the BATAK Duel source code is now reduced to $197 (down from $297, about 33% off). From what Dan told me sales are going good for him, so congratulations to the well-deserved success!
BATAK Duel is available on the App Store for $.99 and this trailer should give you an impression of what this game is about (no, not cheesy voice-overs, don’t let the first impression fool you):
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.
Stu Gisborne is the developer of Orbs Away, a match-3 game using hexagon tiles.
Stu wrote a quick introduction to using Hexagon tiles with Cocos2D and how he built the match-3 game with it.
PS: sorry that this post was delayed by 12 hours, things tend to get crazy shortly before Xmas. And then there’s all this snow. No, I don’t have a better excuse.
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.
The winners of the Learn Cocos2D book contest are …
On Xmas day I started a Book contest where you could win 5 copies of the print version of my Cocos2D book. Now here are the winners!
Three Winners for outstanding contributions
These are the winners that I picked because of what they said in their comments respectively other contributions they made:
Marcotronic for his stunning adaptation of the Beatles’ song “Let it be”. He wrote new lyrics, then re-recorded the song with his own voice. It made me laugh and gave me goosebumps at the same time. I promote this to be the official Learn Cocos2D book hymn! 😀
Let it be: Learn Cocos2D
Dad of Geek And Dad for his heartwarming story about his neighbor being laid off. Things like that shouldn’t happen so undeservedly and I hope his neighbor finds renewed spirit when he receives the book as a gift.
The G man for being so passionate about Cocos2D besides his situation. He only has a dialup connection and the country he lives in doesn’t even allow him to register a domain or join the iOS Development program. I just hope there aren’t any import regulations for programming books.
G also posted this funny reimagination of the Cocos2D logo:
Those are the outstanding commentors that I simply could not resist gifting a book to because of their comments. Congratulations!
Three Lottery Winners
I still had two more winners to pick but couldn’t decide, so I chose to do a lottery to give everyone else a fair chance. I also decided I can spare one additional copy, so there are now 3 lottery winners chosen randomly from the remaining 22 unique commentors with the help of Excel’s RANDBETWEEN() function.
Without further ado, the three lottery winners are:
Dani
Tom
dzk34
Congratulations to all winners! I will contact you by email shortly.
I also wish everyone a Happy New Year 2011! May your code compile and your games sell.