Smart Run was developed on a Macbook and an iMac, with Xcode and the iOS SDK. We tested the game extensively on two iPads and two iPhones and on the simulators for other form factors. The robustness of Apple devices and the high attention to end user experience made the entire experience a pleasure.
My personal take on Apple devices: Among many other things, I love the effort taken by Apple to quality test every application that goes on their iDevices. While there are controversies surrounding some apps being rejected, and some concerns around the walled garden, there is a clear difference between the quality and the dependability of apps on the iOS app store as compared to other more open platforms.
Additionally, we are very thankful for the various tools and resources that enhance the experience of game development in this ecosystem:
cocos2d-iphone - cocos2d is an open source source library (which means it provides a bunch of source files that you add and use within your project) that significantly reduces the time taken to develop iOS 2d games. More on the decision process that led to our choosing cocos2d, and how it worked for us (in a word, very well).
Sharekit - is a source level addon that allows us to easily add sharing capabilities on a large variety of social platforms - Facebook, Twitter, Email, Pinterest, Flickr, etc.
raywenderlich.com - this site hosts the widest range of some of the best tutorials for learning iOS development, ranging from iOS SDK to cocos2d to open GL to unity.
learn-cocos2d.com - this site provides a lot of good content about everything to do with cocos2d game development. I learnt almost everything I know about cocos2d performance optimization from this site.
stackoverflow.com - whenever we got stuck with development or design issues, we used several developer forums, but by far, we found the best and most successful responses at stackoverflow.com.
git and github - we used git for managing source versioning and github to collaborate between the two developers - git is a fantastic version control system and github made it really easy to manage our code.
Preview on Mac - The preview tool on Mac was a blessing when it came to scaling images in bulk - we had a lot of images of the same size that had to be scaled in a simple 1:2:4 ratio. Preview made it really easy to do this.
Automator on Mac - The automator tool on Mac allowed us to automate several repetitive processes of file naming, renaming and other manipulations. I have worked on enterprise workflow technologies for a long time, but automator makes workflow accessible to the common user.
gimp 2 - Even though the graphics in the game were created predominantly by a graphics artist, likely using sophisticated graphics tools, several quick fixes and manipulations were done on gimp 2 - a free open source raster graphics tool.
Texture Packer - This tool makes it real easy to create spritesheets - spritesheets are a great optimization to your images.
Our website was created using simple html, css and jquery and caroufredsel (a jquery based carousel plugin) to display screenshots.
There are several more tools that we used and evaluated, and I will add them to this list later.
Leave a comment to let us know which of these tools you would like more in depth details about.
My personal take on Apple devices: Among many other things, I love the effort taken by Apple to quality test every application that goes on their iDevices. While there are controversies surrounding some apps being rejected, and some concerns around the walled garden, there is a clear difference between the quality and the dependability of apps on the iOS app store as compared to other more open platforms.
Additionally, we are very thankful for the various tools and resources that enhance the experience of game development in this ecosystem:
cocos2d-iphone - cocos2d is an open source source library (which means it provides a bunch of source files that you add and use within your project) that significantly reduces the time taken to develop iOS 2d games. More on the decision process that led to our choosing cocos2d, and how it worked for us (in a word, very well).
Sharekit - is a source level addon that allows us to easily add sharing capabilities on a large variety of social platforms - Facebook, Twitter, Email, Pinterest, Flickr, etc.
raywenderlich.com - this site hosts the widest range of some of the best tutorials for learning iOS development, ranging from iOS SDK to cocos2d to open GL to unity.
learn-cocos2d.com - this site provides a lot of good content about everything to do with cocos2d game development. I learnt almost everything I know about cocos2d performance optimization from this site.
stackoverflow.com - whenever we got stuck with development or design issues, we used several developer forums, but by far, we found the best and most successful responses at stackoverflow.com.
git and github - we used git for managing source versioning and github to collaborate between the two developers - git is a fantastic version control system and github made it really easy to manage our code.
Preview on Mac - The preview tool on Mac was a blessing when it came to scaling images in bulk - we had a lot of images of the same size that had to be scaled in a simple 1:2:4 ratio. Preview made it really easy to do this.
Automator on Mac - The automator tool on Mac allowed us to automate several repetitive processes of file naming, renaming and other manipulations. I have worked on enterprise workflow technologies for a long time, but automator makes workflow accessible to the common user.
gimp 2 - Even though the graphics in the game were created predominantly by a graphics artist, likely using sophisticated graphics tools, several quick fixes and manipulations were done on gimp 2 - a free open source raster graphics tool.
Texture Packer - This tool makes it real easy to create spritesheets - spritesheets are a great optimization to your images.
Our website was created using simple html, css and jquery and caroufredsel (a jquery based carousel plugin) to display screenshots.
There are several more tools that we used and evaluated, and I will add them to this list later.
Leave a comment to let us know which of these tools you would like more in depth details about.
No comments:
Post a Comment