cocos2d - great stuff!

[purbeast0]

with the article i read about flappy bird last week, it made me want to check out gaming on mobile platforms. over the weekend i started messing around and found cocos2d and ran through a tutorial.

and i have to say, this thing is pretty damn neat. this is the tutorial i ran through.

http://www.raywenderlich.com/61391/how-to-make-a-simplea-iphone-game-with-cocos2d-3-0-tutorial

i've done some objective-c programming for ios apps before, but man, this engine made stuff so easy. i could not believe how easy it was to get objects in the game world and have them interacting with eachother and being able to react to all of that. and then just adding sounds and everything is just so simple. i already have a stupid little game that i'm working on that is pretty much finished other than the artwork and GUI, but the basic gameplay is in there.

if you have any interest in 2d gaming on mobile platforms, i suggest checking it out. it's very powerful, neat, and simple for what it does.

maybe i'll get lucky and it will go viral and i'll be raking in $50k/day lol!

 

[Jodell88]

I prefer libGDX personally. It supports iOS, Android, PC (OS X, Windows, Linux), and web with HTML5.

 

[Markbnj]

maybe i'll get lucky and it will go viral and i'll be raking in $50k/day lol!

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2014/02/why-indie-developers-go-insane.html

 

[BikeJunkie]

Yeah, there's a reason there's a gazillion "me-too" apps out there. Barrier to entry is virtually non-existent nowadays (not that I'm criticizing that fact - I think it's great).

 

[Subyman]

As the programming side gets easier, the art side gets harder. I've found the hardest part is either creating nice assets myself or finding people that are good at it.

 

[BikeJunkie]

As the programming side gets easier, the art side gets harder. I've found the hardest part is either creating nice assets myself or finding people that are good at it.

Which is funny because way back in the day when I wrote mods for CS, UT, etc., it was the exact opposite. You had eleventy billion kids who had just learned Photoshop and now wanted to build the best game evar.

It was nice being on the dev side of things, because if you were halfway competent, you could pick the very best from a colossal pool of great and not so great art talent.

 

[purbeast0]

i'm actually in the process of converting my cocos2d app over to android now. i wrote it in the objective-c language for iOS, and now i'm using apportable to get it to run on android. i actually went out and bought the nexus 7 this past weekend to have an android device to test out on.

and it's pretty insane how easily it is ported over to android. i literally added 1 line of code that helps with the screen res/aspect and it was up and running on my android tablet immediately.

now granted it's not 100% done because there are some very ios specific things i have in my game, such as iAds, game center integration, and sharekit (which is a 3rd party sharing framework for ios only). so now i'm in the process of figuring that stuff out on android.

so far i've made some decent strides. i'm now running native java code from my objective c code, which is in then running on the android tablet after building with apportable. really neat stuff to see how it's coming together. it's took me pretty much all day yesterday on my snow day to make some baby steps with this process, but it's only because i'm now trying to do android native stuff. if i didn't want to add any of those 3 things up there, it's the same thing. i think once i get the admob stuff integrated i'm going to submit it to android so people can check it out while i figure out the other stuff.

 

[blackdogdeek]

I just read the tutorial. That sounds incredibly powerful. That can't be more than 100 lines of code and it's a functioning, touch-enabled, collision-detecting game with sound effects. In contrast, the game I created is much less complex and probably has hundreds of lines of code.

Guess I'll have to download the cocos2d installer tonight and play around with it

 

[xantub]

those success stories is just like everything, for every "this dude made this game in 2 days and is selling 50k a week" story, there are 100,000 untold stories about people wasting weeks putting an app that sells 5 copies.

 

[purbeast0]

I just read the tutorial. That sounds incredibly powerful. That can't be more than 100 lines of code and it's a functioning, touch-enabled, collision-detecting game with sound effects. In contrast, the game I created is much less complex and probably has hundreds of lines of code.

Guess I'll have to download the cocos2d installer tonight and play around with it

yeah the tutorial opened my eyes as to how powerful these engines are. it's pretty damn incredible lol.

 

[purbeast0]

if anyone is curious, this is the little thing i was working on.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2376412