#indy developer

[emi-pello]

Shameless plug but the game I had the honor of working on during internship, finally have a gameplay trailer!

If you like pont and click adventure games with the hit of some mystery then check out The Tragedy at Deer Creek.

[itbeonai]

I made an NPC with social anxiety

[ludosimagos]

Independent Developer Exchange Group

Hi Indie Devs,

In relation to my last post about localization, I have started a forum for Indie Developers to exchange languages as well as cross promotion.

I was thinking about the language exchange and some cross promotion exchange, I came to the conclusion that the more we indie’s work together, the better are our chances of success. As most people use a lot of apps and are constantly looking for new ones, we can share exposure and all gain more downloads and sales. Marketing an app is very expensive as we all know, but by doing cross promotion we can reduce our costs and gain better exposure.

On the other hand, as Apple this year said on WWDC localization is a major topic. We can reach far more customers, if we localize our apps. This is a very expensive process if you, employ a professional agency, on the other hand google translate sounds horrible most of the times. On this lines we started the language exchange earlier this year (you can look up the doc in the group notes). I had very good experience with you guys there :-) and it is fantastic to connect that way...

Now in relation to translation exchange there are a lot of possibilities even if you only speak English, for example you could exchange house ads in your app for a translation...

What to do when you like to start an actual exchange? Who would be interested? How to work on translations together? And after some time you remember there was this post, but where is it now?

In this context I thought to start a private(closed) forum, where Indie developer can exchange Ads, Translations, and anything else which could make all of us stronger.

I created a subdomain for this forum: Independent Developer Exchange Group as said it is closed, so you need to apply for membership I will try to approve as fast as possible :-)

Indipendent Developer Exchange Group

Please tell me what you think and we can go from there :-)

If you are interested join the group.

Soon more :-)

Greetings

Anselm

[ludosimagos]

How I created my Graphics!

When I started out to create BeeJuice, I planned to do some fancy 3d graphics.  I started to design my bee in blender, as it is a really good and free 3d software, but when I was ready, I found that I liked a 2d combination of photos and comic style graphics more appealing.

I used photos I made from grass and scaled them to 1024 × 764, using Gimp. Now I created a lot of my scene objects like the bee and my flowers etc.. To create them I used Inkscape, which is a fantastic open source vector based graphic software.

For texture atlases I used Zwoptex as it was the most known at the time.

For the starters, a texture atlas is a combination of a png file with all your sprites on it and a plist file which contains the name, the coordinates and additional infos of your sprite within the png.

Why to use a texture atlas? In short it helps you safe memory while your app is running.

For my particle design I used Particle Designer which is brilliant for creating particle emitter visually, as you have thousands of different possibilities to program them it makes life so much easier to see strait away what it looks like.

For my bitmap fonts I used Glyph Designer.

What do I need bitmap fonts for?

As the process of rendering TTF fonts is pretty high and can affect your frame rate, a bitmap font is pre rendered. So it is much easier for OpenGL ES to push the images to the screen.

I used a lot of open source software, as they are usually fulfilled my needs, and help to keep the budget small.

[ludosimagos]

Along the way of creating my first app!

After finishing the books mentioned in my last article, I had found a book called Beginning IPhone Games Development. Now for me this book was helpful to understand some of the basic concepts of OpenGL-ES, but I would not fully recommend it! It is some sort of additional source, because, for one thing there are several chapters in it which are just useless, especially chapter 4... The other thing is, that it might give you the feeling that you can achieve a lot more very quick when designing your own framework. This was at least the case with me. It took me about two months to realise that you can achieve your goal a lot quicker, by using a framework like cocos2d etc.. Still I put a link to the book into this article just so you can have a look at it.

I really understood what I wanted to do, when I tried to move the window along with my bee... (Here the link to the free BeeJuice Lite in case you haven't tried it yet!). I tried to get the "camera" to move along with my bee for at least two weeks, it just did not work as I wished it... In the end I thought, why should I, a programming newbie, reinvent the wheel? I checked out what frameworks there are. (Unity, corona, cocos2d etc.)

In the end I decided to go with cocos2d, mainly because it is open source. I found the book Learn iPhone and iPad cocos2d Game Development by Steffen Itterheim. This book is just absolutely brilliant! I achieved what I had done the four months before in one month, a huge part of that success came from the book itself, because Steffen explains the basics of cocos2d really brilliant, in my opinion...  The second part was the fantastic support through the cocos2d community! I would like to mention the two forums I used, one is Steffen's cocos2d central the other one is the fantastic official cocos2d forum. Both did really help and have a very helpful and supporting community! I would like to post the links to the book I used and the all new Editions...

Next time I plan to go into the tools I used. I would love to get some feedback, so send a message or comment...

[ludosimagos]

Which books came next?

Continuing my last post I would like to tell you about the next two books I read , to learn programming, especially IPhone programming. I would never say I am a crack... But slowly I seem to get somewhere...

So to get some basics I got "Learning Objective C on the Mac" by Mark Dalrymple and Scott Knaster:

It is a bit old by now, but it is simply perfect to show you the basics of Objective C. And every time I am stuck again I still use it. It helps to understand the basic concepts of Objective C and even if you plan using a framework like cocos2d, it still is really good to get the programming concepts.

The second book I would like to recommend today is "Beginning iPhone 5 Development: Exploring the iOS 5 SDK" from David Mark , Jack Nutting, Jeff LaMarche

I used an older version, but it was and is just brilliant. I really love it.

It helped me to understand some of the most important concepts of App development.

In my next post I plan to tell you how I came to develop with cocos2d and some of my experience along the way.

[ludosimagos]

Which books did I use?

Before my first App I had never programmed anything. After my last job ended I decided to give it a try. As I had no programming experience, I had to learn everything from the start. As I had decided to start with IPhone programming I had to learn C first.

In the beginning I thought I would program my own framework, I soon decided against that, but I will come to that in a later post.

To learn C I bought a book called "Learn C on the Mac" by Dave Mark.

And today I would like to recommend it to any developer, who wants to start with C on a Mac. It is really brilliant, as the author is explaining the absolute basics of C programming in terms, that even a total newbie like me understands :-)

The book gives you the basic understanding of C programming language which you need to advance to Objective C.

Objective C is a superset of C , you need this language to program for the IPhone. In my next post I will talk about the books I used to learn Objective C and I-OS programming.