Where to Find Help

Whether you’re facing a technical problem that you can’t solve on your own or need more people to work on your game, you can get help. In addition, if you’re looking for art, audio, or tools, I know just where you can find what you’re looking for, or at least where you can begin your search.

Tutorials and FAQs

Plenty of tutorials for cocos2d are on the Web, but one tutorial writer clearly stands out from the crowd: Ray Wenderlich. He’s written more than a dozen cocos2d tutorials and published them on his web site: www.raywenderlich.com/tag/cocos2d. Besides cocos2d tutorials, on this site you’ll also find other highly interesting iPhone SDK–related tips and tricks. In at least one particular case, this is also helpful for cocos2d developers, where Ray explains how to save and load your app’s data. This can be applied to saving and loading games as well (see www.raywenderlich.com/1914/how-to-save-your-app-data-with-nscoding-and-nsfilemanager).

The iDevBlogADay articles on my Learn & Master cocos2d web site (www.learn-cocos2d.com/ category/idevblogaday) are mainly tutorials and guides. You learn how to enable ARC in cocos2d projects, gain insights in the iOS Sales Statistics, how to write a Webcam Viewer with cocos2d, and how to upgrade an existing cocos2d project to a newer version—and a lot more.

You should definitely join the Twitterverse and create a list or saved search for cocos2d and kobold2d. There are so many really good tutorials, but they’re spread far and wide. Another great way to keep track of great articles about iOS development in general is to visit the Cocoa Literature web site (http://cocoalit.com) every now and then. Cocoa Literature aggregates only the best and most helpful articles.

Source Code Projects to Benefit From

Personally, I learn best by browsing through other people’s code. One of the first things I did when I got cocos2d and found the documentation lacking was to invest in the Sapus Tongue source code project to see how cocos2d is actually being used in a game. It was very helpful for getting started quickly.

The advantage of commercially sold source code compared to the open source projects is that you rarely get support for the latter, and they’re almost never updated, to the point that most of the open source projects you’ll find are using versions of cocos2d prior to v1.0—with one exception, the official cocos2d-iphone-extensions project: www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/17546.

The following source code projects are all commercial offerings. I refrain from listing prices because they’re subject to change. You can also browse these products on my Affiliate Products page, where you can also find newer products not listed in the book: www.learn-cocos2d.com/store/affiliate-products.

Cocos2D Podcast

Mohammad Azam and I are recording the Cocos2D Podcast to report on recent events; to talk about hot topics; to interview game developers, tool authors, and bloggers; and to give listeners insider information and insights into game development with cocos2d.

The Cocos2D Podcast is available on cocos2dpodcast.wordpress.com, and new episodes are announced on www.learn-cocos2d.com/blog. Each episode runs between 30 to 60 minutes. Here’s a selection of episode topics we’ve covered so far:

• Earning additional revenue using iAds, IAP, selling source code, and so on
• Michael Daley explains Particle Designer and Glyph Designer
• Ray Wenderlich talks about Cocos2d, his book, workshops, and more
• Andreas Löw explains TexturePacker and PhysicsEditor
• Vladu Bogdan expounds on LevelHelper and SpriteHelper
• Zynga acquires Cocos2d contributors
• Tools in Cocos2d iPhone game development
• Game engines and frameworks as alternatives to Cocos2d

Tools, Tools, Tools

In this book I’ve introduced you to what I think are the best tools for each purpose. However, there are usually alternatives. If you also read the first edition of this book, you know that I used different tools in that first edition than here in the second. In less than a year, some tools put on wings, and others essentially stopped progressing and fell behind.

Because that almost natural process is not going to change in the future, and it’s hard to predict which tools are here to stay and which aren’t over the coming years, I wanted to share an alphabetically sorted list of currently existing tools that you can use for cocos2d without going into describing them and regardless of their current state, except of course that they need to be usable and functional at the very least.

You can use the following tools for development with cocos2d. I highlighted my personal favorites in bold:

• Bitmap font tools
• BMFont (Windows): www.angelcode.com/products/bmfont
• Fonteditor: http://code.google.com/p/fonteditor
• Glyph Designer: http://glyphdesigner.71squared.com
• Hiero: http://slick.cokeandcode.com/demos/hiero.jnlp
• LabelAtlasCreator: www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/4357
• Particle editing tools
• ParticleCreator: www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/16363
• Particle Designer: http://particledesigner.71squared.com
• Physics editing tools
• Mekanimo: www.mekanimo.net
• PhysicsBench: www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/9064
• PhysicsEditor: www.physicseditor.de
• VertexHelper: www.cocos2d-iphone.org/archives/779
• Scene editing tools
• CocosBuilder: http://cocosbuilder.com
• Cocoshop: www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/15668
• LevelHelper: www.levelhelper.org
• Texture atlas tools
• DarkFunction Editor: http://darkfunction.com
• SpriteHelper: www.spritehelper.org
• TexturePacker: www.texturepacker.com
• Zwoptex: zwoptexapp.com
• Tilemap editing tools
• iTileMaps (iPad): www.klemix.com/page/iTileMaps.aspx
• Tiled Map Editor: www.mapeditor.org

Cocos2d Reference Apps

The following is a list of games and apps made with cocos2d. They should serve as shining examples of what you can do with cocos2d as well as the creativity of cocos2d developers.

Instead of providing an iTunes link to each app in the book, I decided to create a post on my blog where I host all the links to the games mentioned here, and I’ll update this list to include noteworthy games released after the book has been published. You can find the list of links to these apps, including other links of interest, on the Great Apps Made With cocos2d page: www.learn-cocos2d.com/2010/10/great-apps-made-with-cocos2d.

• The Elements (iPad) is a graphical representation of the periodic table of elements. The outstanding features are the plenjpgul photographs and smooth 360 animations that invite you to explore the elements that make up you, me, and the rest of the universe (excluding empty space, of which there’s a lot I’ve been told). It’s priced high but worth every cent, and if you need an app that will let you brag about your new iPad, this is it!
• Bloomies is a colorful gardening game, full of bees (see Figure 17-6). If that doesn’t sway you, maybe the idea of fostering and nurturing your own garden does. The flowers need your constant attention, and the game play is addictive, just like any Tamagotchi-style game. Oh, and it happens to be made by two former colleagues of mine. It’s just a beaujpgul game, and so is their follow-up game, Super Blast.

• StickWars is a game where you defend your castle from incoming stick figures by flicking them in the air or literally shaking them to the ground. The developer, John Hartzog, had never before worked with Objective-C or on mobile devices, but he pulled it off. StickWars remains to this date within the top 100 games and continues to be updated even a year after the initial release.
• ZombieSmash is also a castle defense game, except that this time hordes of zombies are attacking, and you get explosives, 16-ton weights, shotguns, and other cool items that make a bloody mess to fend them off (see Figure 17-7). Your castle is your barn, and if you can defend it, you’ll be rewarded with a slow-motion animation of the final zombie losing its, err, unlife. The outstanding feature of this game is certainly the rag-doll animation system that allows zombies to walk, crawl, or otherwise try to move even if they’ve lost some of their limbs.

• Super Turbo Action Pig revives the simple game play concept of a scrolling level where your character always falls down, except when you touch the screen to boost his jetpack. The extraordinary part here is that the game’s graphics are extremely well made and the overall presentation of the game, the trailer, the web site, and the humor set a great example.
• Then there’s Farmville—do I even have to explain what it’s about? It’s an incredibly successful Facebook game that has millions of players worldwide building their farms in an isometric landscape. It just goes to show how powerful cocos2d is if a company like Zynga uses it to port its most successful game to the iPhone. It’s notable that Zombie Farm came out on the iPhone before Farmville, and it was also created with cocos2d.
• Melvin Says There’s Monsters (iPad) is a beaujpgully animated cartoon kid story with professional-quality voiceovers. The story is cleverly constructed and has an insightful turning point. It’s a pleasure to watch even for an adult, and it also uses cocos2d’s page-flip animations very effectively. If you have an iPad and kids, it’s a must have!
• Trainyard is an innovative puzzle game that was clearly engineered with the user in mind. It features a mode for the color-blind, is optimized to use little battery power, saves and loads the game just as the user left it, and even allows users to share puzzle solutions on the Web, using a duplicate of the game engine written in Flash. All this, besides being a really innovative puzzle game where you lay tracks and combine trains to match them with colored train yards.
• Abstract War 2.0 is a dual-stick shooter featuring colorful and vibrant geometric visuals (see Figure 17-8). It’s obviously inspired by Geometry Wars on Xbox Live Arcade. It’s an intense space-shooter with plenty of game modes. You can even play it in multiplayer mode via a Bluetooth connection, and it allows you to use your own iPod music.

• Fuji Leaves is an interesting music game, where dropping balls hit leaves, and depending on the speed and location of impact, a sound is played. With several balls on the screen bouncing around, you can dynamically create musical scores. It’s intensely fascinating to play this game, trying to come up with interesting scores and just the right placement of leaves. Before you know it, an hour has passed.

Working with Publishers

In the early days of computer programming, developers single-handedly copied their game code onto floppy disks and shrink-wrapped it to sell it in local software and hardware stores. Those days are long gone, and with the increasing complexity of games, publishers have taken on the task of distributing and marketing games. This model has been the default for the past 20 years or so, but with the advent of the indie game scene in recent years, mostly driven by new technologies such as downloadable games, the Xbox Live Indie Games channel, and Apple’s App Store, more and more game developers are turning to self-publishing again. So, why would you want to work with a publisher these days?

The first reason is technical support and testing. Publishers want to make sure that every game they release does not reflect badly on their reputations, so one of their goals is to release games with as few bugs as possible and with polished game play. If you’re not used to this process, which includes the scrutiny of a quality assurance team, you’ll be in for a surprise, and it may not always be a pleasant one—such as the game’s release being held back due to yet another obscure and hard to-find bug. So, that’s a bad thing? To the contrary, it forces you to work with an attention to detail that’s all too often neglected and dismissed by hobbyist developers. And in the end, you’ll be rewarded with a better game. In most cases, this also translates to more favorable reviews by press and players alike and thus more sales.

Working with an established publisher also reflects positively on you, simply because of the respected games already released by said publisher. I don’t mean that in an ego-trip kind of way. You’re not special because you’re working with big-name publisher X—but you sure will learn a lot, and that’s going to make you stand out from the crowd. It also improves your street cred and the chances of landing a better job or contract sometime down the road.

The experiences working with a publisher don’t just involve game programming and the things you’ll pick up from technical support and the quality assurance process. You’ll also sign a contract and get a glimpse at all the legalese and paperwork involved (it’s really not that bad).

Signing a standard contract with a publisher is more like opening a bank account. Everything is ready-made, and you just have to fill in a few blanks. Expect the publisher to take anywhere between 30 to 70 percent of the revenue. It depends a lot on what they do, in which phase of development they come on board, and whether they support you financially.

If you allow yourself to learn from working with a publisher, it can be very insightful to get an impression of the details that need to be specified to get everything in order from a financial and legal point of view. If the publisher has a good track record with other developers, you can feel assured that they’re not going to screw you over. But you definitely need to understand the terms you’re signing, because if you’re used to posting your sales numbers, for example, those may now be covered by a nondisclosure agreement you signed with the publisher.

You do give up a certain amount of freedom, and you need to be able to live with it and trust the publisher to do the best job they can for those parts you’re giving up. For example, if a publisher is asking you for a change in direction for certain aspects of your game, you should seriously consider it. At least most of them know what they’re talking about, and they also know what’s working and what isn’t (this certainly isn’t the case for all of them, though). However, because games is a very subjective field, publishers do have the tendency to favor proven sets of features over other risky but innovative ones—but less so on iOS, where publishers are more willing and able to give their developers creative freedom, if not total control over the design of the game.

In return for giving up some freedoms, they’ll reward you with marketing your game. They know the channels, and they have a direct feed to the review web sites and the press. And that’s possibly another area of expertise you’ll learn a lot from. The press has a certain way they like to receive and consume the information they need to write a review about your game. Your publisher knows all about it will request a few things from you that you wouldn’t have considered on your own, such as high-resolution artwork or a one-line catchphrase that really gets players interested in your game.

If you get the chance to cooperate with a publisher, my advice is to go for it at least once, no matter how much you value your creative freedom. Afterward, you’ll understand much better what you’re giving up and what you’re receiving in return, at least in that particular case. Whatever your experience may be, the experience alone and what you’ll learn should make it worthwhile (and maybe it will be rewarding enough to do it again—but if not, you’ll know why).

There are several game publishers you may want to consider contacting. Your best shot would be those who market specifically for iOS or mobile devices, and in that area two names stand out from the crowd. One is ngmoco, which published Goldfinger, We Rule, We Farm, Epic Pet Wars, and Rolando. Visit ngmoco’s web site at www.ngmoco.com. The other is Chillingo, who has released games like Minigore, the Quest, Knight’s Rush, and of course Angry Birds. Chillingo’s web site is www.chillingo.com.

Finding Freelancers

If you believe in your game and you’re ready to invest money into it, you may want to get help from professional freelancers worldwide. Besides asking for jobs in the cocos2d forum itself, you can also post a job offer on one of the more popular outsourcing web sites. Likewise, you can also offer your expertise as a freelancer to employers on these sites. Plenty of web sites offer such services; you’ll even find some that can hook you up with someone close to where you live.

I’ll refer you to the ones that I know work best and have a good reputation: they’re eLance (www.elance.com) and Guru (www.guru.com).

They both work on the same principle. You post a job offer, which could be a small task or an entire project. Then you receive proposals from candidates, from which you can pick one or more to do the job. Once you've received, reviewed, and approved the work, you pay the freelancer. Abuse can be reported and basically locks the offender out of the platform, so although you need to be able to trust people you’ve never worked with, the risks are minimal for both parties. I recommend choosing smaller tasks to start with. Just as if you were to get into the stock market, by starting small you can get a good feel for how this works and what can happen.

Finding Free Art and Audio

The alternative to hiring someone to do the work for you is to find the work available on the Internet (preferably for free). However, be careful about anything that’s “free.” I’m not saying that it might have a catch; I’m warning about the common misconception that free means “can be used freely.” It may not cost you anything to get an image or audio file that’s free, but that doesn’t tell you anything about what you’re legally allowed to do with it. That’s typically where a license should come into play but often doesn’t. A lot of people publish their own source code, artwork, audio, and writings for free on the Internet but forget to add a proper license file to it if the work is intended to be used by others. The problem is that by default, the author has the copyright and retains all rights to how the work can be used. If there’s no explicit waiver, preferably in the form of a license, then you should not use this work (especially not in commercial products, and that includes $0.99 apps sold via the iTunes App Store).

For reference, I’d like to point you to Funplosion Labs, which has an article listing web sites where you can get free game graphics and audio. Funplosion also disclaims this with a warning about the copyright and a link to the license agreement for each web site (see http://funplosion.com/free-assets.html).

And don’t forget the wonderful OpenGameArt website (http://opengameart.org) where you’ll find not just art but also sound and music for free.

Finding the Tools of the Trade

Sometimes you may wish you had a tool that just does that, whatever that might be. There are times as a game developer where you need to process data, modify images, or build whole worlds—things that are tedious and error-prone to do in code or simply too time-consuming to do on your own because you’d rather focus on writing your game.

My tip is to use the Indie Game Tools web site, which collects, categorizes, and allows others to rate game design tools for independent game developers. The focus here isn’t on expensive software used by professional studios but on low-cost and free solutions for about anything, from game engines to converters, from scripting languages to server technologies, and from asset packages to game editors. Maintained by Robert “Robc” Charney, it’s the place I go to see if there’s a tool available that fits my bill. Visit the site here: http://indiegametools.com.

Just a minor caveat: don’t put too much weight on the ratings of individual tools. The number of ratings is very small, so there can be huge differences between similar tools, and the ratings may be biased by both unhappy users and proactive communities. You should leave your mark and add some of your own ratings so that over time the ratings become more accurate. In addition, some tools simply can’t be compared by rating; they may have totally different uses, making it unfair to compare them based on their rankings on the Indie Game Tools web site.

Marketing

So, you made a game and submitted it to the App Store. Now what? How do people find your game in the first place?

The story starts at the beginning. The moment you begin working on your game should also be the starting point for your marketing efforts. Get a web site up and running and post your development experiences and maybe some work-in-progress screenshots. That should be your first step to connect with other game developers.

In terms of the marketing and business aspects, I’d like to save you some time. The following link is to the Big List of Indie Marketing and Business Tips, and I have to say that’s an understatement. You’ll find most of the meaningful and intelligent articles ever written on the subject on just this one page, so be sure to look at it even if you’re only mildly interested in the marketing and business aspects of indie game development. Check it out at www.pixelprospector.com/indev/2010/08/the-big-list-of-indie-marketingand-business-tips.

Still interested in marketing? Good, check out the free e-book Videogame Marketing and PR, written by Scott Steinberg. You can get it on the book’s web site: www.sellmorevideogames.com.

Engaging Players for More Revenue

Every platform has a number of peripheral technologies that are helpful if not essential, at least in some cases and for some developers. On the iOS platform, this includes the ever-growing list of social networking platforms to choose from, besides Apple’s Game Center. Then there’s server development kits that you might need for developing persistent games that ought to connect to your own server, be it to find and run matches of more than four players or simply to save characters, progress, settings, and worlds online.

And, although sometimes seen as dubious, providing ads in games can create an additional revenue stream, especially for free games and lite versions. Often in conjunction with ads, you can also investigate whether it would help your game to add analytics and metrics in order to find out where players fail most often, what buttons they click the most, and how frequently they play individual game modes. This can help you tweak your game to be more fun for more players.