How to write code that is relevant for both Cocos2D and Sprite Kit, and as an extension to that the Kobold (2D/Touch/Kit) projects?
Because for the past months I shifted my attention to Sprite Kit, in order to create Kobold Kit and an accompanying Starterkit. While it’s obvious that Sprite Kit has everyone’s attention, I don’t want to turn my back on cocos2d-iphone and KoboldTouch. So from that came the need to create as much code as possible in a portable way.
The result is OpenGW, the world’s first game world simulation engine available to the public (in Nov/Dec). This is the holy grail I’ve been unknowingly searching for the past couple years!
What is OpenGW?
OpenGW stands for Open Game World.
It is a data-driven, engine-agnostic, cross-platform game world simulation engine.
I’ve set up a stub page where you’ll find more info on OpenGW.
Why OpenGW?
With the release of iOS 7 (ETA: Tuesday, Sept. 10th):
Kobold Kit will be available as open source under the MIT License!
We spent a lot of thoughts on how we like to run an open source project. And also why. I’ll start with an executive summary with more (perhaps too many) details in the text.
The Idea: make the project as open and inviting as possible. Let contributors gain control over and take on responsibility for the project based on their contributions. Provide them with ways to promote their work on their own accord.
The Goal: build the Sprite Kit game engine with the help of many developers.
Kobold Kit is supposed to become the “patron project” under whose roof the most valuable Sprite Kit extensions are combined. Website, forum, wiki, blog and store are extended playgrounds shaped by community members. If you’re part of the project, we want you to proudly present and benefit from it.
In essence: we want to get out of the way as much as possible and enable anyone to find their place in the project. Guidance, not dictating, is our guideline.
This post will be unusually short because I’m going on vacation tomorrow (July 12th) and won’t be back before July 22nd.
I’ll use this post for a quick progress report on Kobold Kit.
Kobold Kit Progress
Kobold Kit is going more and more in a rapid-development direction, with fewer interruptions. Here’s the corresponding video to that:
It is also heavily gearing towards tilemap rendering and physics integration. We’re making a game with Kobold Kit which will become a Platformer Starterkit as well as a published game. It will also be featured in an upcoming book.
When I say we, I mean that a former colleague of mine (Marcus) has teamed up with me. He’s a game designer and Tiled user, so I get lots of good feedback on how to improve and move things in the right direction. You’ll see more of his work when we’re both back from our vacations in August.
The fact that I haven’t posted on the koboldkit.com blog for a week only means we were very busy making lots of smaller improvements to the platformer game we’re developing. I’ll be away for 1 week so I wanted to ensure that Marcus can get some work done while I’m away.
This is one other plus about this partnership: Kobold Kit will decouple as many tasks as possible from programming work and offload them to editing tools, configuration files and scripting. These improvements are beneficial to the programmers as well because they enable or speed up rapid prototyping.
And if you do happen to work with designers, your attention will not be required as often. If you haven’t done so in the past, you probably can’t appreciate what that means. But try anyway. 😉
Since Kobold Kit is so heavily integrated with Tiled, we decided to sponsor Thorbjørn Lindeijer and Tiled beginning August 1st. I also sent him my old Mac mini so he can setup daily builds for OS X.
We have also secured several sponsors ourselves, and we’re very excited about one in particular, but we don’t want to spoil the fun with a premature announcement. All in due time.
PS: In case you haven’t built the latest Tiled source code: you’re seriously missing out on the reworked properties pane (no longer a modal dialog). Here’s a OS X build of the Tiled source code (June 29th) if you want to give it a try. Thanks to Andreas Löw who built it for me.
KoboldTouch Update
I have received very little support or feature requests in the past weeks. I take this as a sign of maturity. At this point development on KoboldTouch is on hold until some time after the release of Sprite Kit (iOS 7). I will tend to serious bugs of course, and already made a compatibility fix for iOS 7 and Xcode 5.
I can’t say whether KoboldTouch will continue to incorporate cocos2d v3 or not. This depends on too many hard to predict variables:
Will cocos2d-iphone v3 be competitive compared to Sprite Kit and still used by a considerable number of developers? Will users be interested enough in an MVC framework with extras? Will cocos2d v3 perhaps take the chance and improve in ways that make KoboldTouch much less attractive? And how much or for how long is development time best spent (exclusively) on Kobold Kit, how much danger is there in splitting efforts?
I take a “wait and see” approach. The hope I have is that cocos2d will trim down its own API and copy the Sprite Kit API and behavior to become a natural, seamless “upgrade path” for Sprite Kit developers (drop-in replacement).
It won’t work any other way, or would you willingly switch from, say, MapKit to an open source alternative (route-me)? Only if you absolutely have to, am I right? Though the only “must have” feature that cocos2d will always offer over Sprite Kit requires an advanced skill set to exploit it in the first place.
But all of that is speculative at this point. If you’re a KoboldTouch developer or want to become one, you’ll get the support as always and you’ll be able to publish your game two years from now. That’s guaranteed.
As KoboldTouch user you’re also going to be Kobold Kit customers, I won’t charge KoboldTouch users twice. And if you want early access to Kobold Kit, sign up to Kobold Touch and check the forum. Since I can only unlock you manually you’ll have to wait until I’m back though.
Signing up to KoboldTouch now makes perfect sense because you’ll pay forever less than Kobold Kit customers, and it helps our efforts in more ways than just financially.
See you in 10 days!
For one week only (until Tuesday, December 18th) CartoonSmart runs an exclusive offer for Learn Cocos2D readers:
You get 50% off on the Angry Ninjas, Wave Attack and Awesome E-Book Starter Kits Bundle!
The bundle also includes several Tutorial Videos plus free bonuses: the Isometric Pixel Art Tutorial for Photoshop, the royalty free Vector Art Collection and the first 120 pages of the interactive Cocos2D iOS Game Programming iBook.
The iOS App Development & Starter Kit Bundle normally sells for $100 but you can get it for $49.95 until Tuesday, December 18th.
This is an affiliate link - if you make a purchase I’ll receive a commission. It’ll help me pay off my new iMac (still working with a 2009 model). 
Line-Drawing Starter Kit still 50% off
While I’m at it: my Line-Drawing Starterkit’s Xmas Sale (50% off to $49.95) still has some of the 100 coupon codes left!
I keep forgetting that if I don’t keep mentioning it, sales slow down dramatically. It’s called marketing (in my case: not doing enough of it). If you have a product that doesn’t sell as much as you expect - perhaps you need to mention it more? You would be surprised how much of a difference frequent blog posts or tweets can make.
So here you go. This new iMac is rather expensive.
This year’s Line-Drawing Game Starter Kit Xmas sale starts early and runs for two months until January 7th, 2013. You can have it for $49.50 instead of $99 - 50% off!
But there’s a catch: the XMAS2012 coupon code has only 100 uses! Act fast before it’s used up.
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, and iOS 6.Includes ARC enabled versions of the starterkit!XMAS Sale - 50% off - only $49.50Enter: XMAS2012 as coupon code.Coupon code limited to 100 uses. Act now!
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If you ever wanted to build your own 2D top-down view train driving game, here’s … well, the things you need to consider plus a rudimentary source code example. Because a train following tracks is not as simple as it might seem, unless you restrict curves and switches to 90° angles and allow only very short cars and locomotives.
Here’s a video of my example project. Any stuttering is due to the screen recording software taking a toll on my system combined with the video playback framerate not rendering 60 fps (I assume it’s the standard 24 or 30 fps for Youtube videos). The video shows a sequence of three runs with a medium curve radius, a large curve radius and a ridiculously small curve radius. The yellow line indicates the track being followed by the axles, the purple line indicates the car chassis position (center point between axles). Continue reading »
Get the latest versions of Kobold2D from the download page and more details in the Release Notes.
Kobold2D v1.1.1 has been updated to include the latest version of cocos2d-iphone v1.1 (beta2b) from May 3rd this year. This version supports the -ipad and -ipadhd suffixes.
Both Kobold2D v1.1.1 and v2.0.1 have been updated to include the latest Chipmunk v6.1.1 and Chipmunk SpaceManager v0.1.3. Although unfortunately SpaceManager still isn’t fully compatible with cocos2d-iphone 2.0 because it still won’t rotate the sprites.
Again both versions include an important fix for KKInput: I’ve received several reports where users complained that KKInput is missing some events. Specifically the “ThisFrame” variants were prone to never fire. This is now fixed.
Line-Drawing Game Starterkit: ARC + cocos2d v1.1 & v2.0
While I’ve been meddling with Kobold2D updates I found this to be the perfect opportunity to update the Line-Drawing Game Starterkit as well. You now get four versions of the project, two are using cocos2d-iphone v1.1 and the other two have been updated to work with cocos2d-iphone v2.0.
And each of the two cocos2d-iphone version projects allows you to choose between the ARC enabled project or the classic manual reference counting project. The included readme document explains this in greater detail. Suffice it to say you can simply choose with which to start: cocos2d v1.1 or v2.0 and either with ARC enabled or manual reference counting.
Of course I strongly recommend the cocos2d-iphone v2.0 version with ARC enabled, seeing how the old devices have an ever diminishing, probably below 15% market share.
And do use ARC, it’s really a no-brainer not to bother with reference counting anymore.
If you’re an existing customer, you should have received an update email with your download link.
A presentation about KoboldScript with a demonstration of a Tic Tac Toe game with Scene changes and transitions. You’ll see more KoboldScript code and learn more about its key concepts in this episode.
Episode #7 - Tic Tac To Lua
• KoboldScript Demo #2
o Tic Tac Toe
o Presentation
• iDevBlogADay: Donations
• Angry Ninjas Starterkit
