Here’s a crazy thought: with commercial game kits (game source code products) being popular and financially rewarding – why not crowd-fund an iOS game by selling it’s source code, resources and development insights while you’re creating it?
Marcus and I will give this idea a spin. Marcus is a game designer I worked with at Electronic Arts Phenomic for 6 years. I’m sure you know me. Together we’re going to create a tilemap-based physics game using cocos2d and KoboldScript (Lua scripting for cocos2d). And we are going to sell everything we’ll create practically from day one.
If that sounds even slightly intruiging to you, we’d love to get your feedback!
Visit the launch page and take our survey which has already helped us tremendously to focus on what’s important for you. For example I’ve converted the entire KoboldScript library to use ARC seeing how important ARC is to you.
But do keep on reading for more details … Continue reading »
Chapter 11 - Isometric Tilemaps
After Chapter 10 introduced Tiled and working with orthogonal tilemaps it’s time to step things up a notch and delve into isometric tilemaps. It starts with basic principles of isometric tilemaps and editing before going into detail on what’s different code-wise compared to orthogonal tilemaps. Obviously this has to include how to determine which isometric tile was touched and how to move a character across an isometric tilemap.
Summary of working on Chapter 10 - Working with Tilemaps
This chapter introduces you to tilemaps, what they are and what benefits and tradeoffs they provide. Without a doubt the most popular editor for tilemaps for use with cocos2d is the Tiled Map Editor. I explain how to use it over several pages before going into code and actually loading your first tilemap using cocos2d’s CCTMXTiledMap class.
Loading a tilemap is just half the story. You’ll also learn how to manipulate the tilemap layers and individual tiles, as well as scrolling the tilemap and centering the touched tile on screen. The code takes care that the tilemap is never scrolled outside its boundaries.
While working with the Object Layer feature of Tiled (CCTMXObjectGroup in cocos2d) I noticed it’ll be handy to display the rectangles on the screen. So you’ll also learn a little custom drawing using OpenGL ES respectively cocos2d’s wrapper functions in CCDrawPrimitives.
