For the past two weeks I’ve been running a Cocos2D Developer Survey. As of today, 236 developers started the survey and 189 finished it completely. That’s 80% despite the many questions they had to answer.
Here are the results with my observations. I started the survey also to see if I was on track with KoboldTouch, and whether certain assumptions hold true. Specifically I had a hunch that cross-platform development is only perceived to have great value or appeal. Let’s see if I was right.
Click on each image for full resolution.
Who are you?
I was very curious how many cocos2d developers consider themselves to be hobbyists and indies compared to professionals, who either work for a mobile developer or are taking on freelance jobs as one.
Almost half of those who answered the survey are hobbyists. Nearly 30% consider themselves indies who make a living making mobile games. This is great! Continue reading »
Scheduled for release on November 7th, 2011. Continue reading »
For the second edition of the Learn Cocos2D book I compiled an alphabetically sorted list of tools that developers can use for cocos2d projects. Please let me know if there’s a tool missing from this list or if there’s one that won’t work anymore and hasn’t been updated in months.
The following tools can be used for development with cocos2d:
Bitmap Font Tools
BMFont (Windows)
Fonteditor
Glyph Designer
bmGlyph
Hiero
LabelAtlasCreator
Particle Editing Tools
ParticleCreator
Particle Designer
Physics Editing Tools
Mekanimo
PhysicsBench
PhysicsEditor
VertexHelper
Scene Editing Tools
CocosBuilder
Cocoshop
LevelHelper
Texture Atlas Tools
DarkFunction Editor
SpriteHelper
TexturePacker
Zwoptex
Tilemap Editing Tools
It’s coming along great!
I completed the revisions on Chapter 1 through 5. The entire source code is now updated to use cocos2d-iphone v1.0.0 rc2. To make future code updates easier I also wrote a script that allows me to copy a newer cocos2d version to all projects, which essentially does Steps 1 & 2 described in the Updating Cocos2D in an Existing Project tutorial.
Most Notable Changes
Chapter 4 now includes a description of Glyph Designer for making Bitmap Fonts, and only mentions Hiero on the side. Glyph Designer is the better tool hands down.
Chapter 5 has seen a revision of the paragraph that explains subclassing from NSObject. I think I went too far off course here and subclassing from CCNode will make a lot of things easier while still giving the same benefits regarding class composition.
In Chapter 6 I decided to replace all descriptions of Zwoptex with TexturePacker as the preferred tool for making texture atlases.
For a while it looked like Zwoptex and TexturePacker would be competing on the same level. But recently Andreas Löw (TexturePacker & PhysicsEditor) made the move to work full-time on his tools, whereas Robert Payne is busy with a full-time job. I think the prospects are looking much better for TexturePacker now, and it is already leading in terms of features and update frequency.
That’s it for now.
In this episode of the Cocos2D Podcast Mohammad Azam and I talked with Andreas Löw, developer of TexturePacker & PhysicsEditor, about his products and the game that he is developing, among other things.
In my book I explained how to create collision shapes for physic engines using the freely available version of VertexHelper Pro. Granted, it works, but as soon as you need to update your shapes frequently or you have many different shapes to edit it’s going to be a lot of manual work and error-prone copy & paste between VertexHelper’s code generator and your source code.
VertexHelper, meet your replacement: PhysicsEditor
PhysicsEditor was written by Andreas Löw, the author of the very popular TexturePacker tool. He has proved again that he can create powerful yet easy to use tools for game developers.
The greatest part about PhysicsEditor: it can automatically trace your shapes to generate collision shapes and it works flawlessly! You can even tweak the amount of vertices (and a lot of other things) as needed, for example if your physics engine has a limitation on how many vertices can be used for a collision shape (Box2D default: 8 vertices).
But it doesn’t just create the collision shapes, it also allows you to edit physics properties of a shape that often go along with it. Density, friction, “bouncyness”, and other parameters can be tweaked in the GUI.
As they say, an image speaks louder than words, so I suppose a video speaks in a thousand images:
Not just Cocos2D
PhysicsEditor currently exports to Cocos2D + Box2D (Chipmunk/SpaceManager support is forthcoming and should be available soon) and also to Sparrow Framework + Chipmunk and of course Corona SDK.
And it works on Windows, too! Which makes sense given that Corona supports Android development under Windows.
I also found this post about PhysicsEditor with a working Flash example (at the bottom). It seems that even exporting respectively using PhysicsEditor with Flash + Box2D seems to work well. Wow!
Brace for impact!
Check out the PhysicsEditor Features page to learn more about what this great tool can do for you! You can get PhysicsEditor alone for $17.94 but you can also grab a bundle deal which includes TexturePacker for $29.99, or almost 20% off.
