Tiny Tim Games

UPDATE: The changes outlined in this post have now been merged into the main Cocos2D develop tree, so you should grab from there as I will no longer be maintaining a separate repo for this.

You will still need to follow the steps below to include Cocos2D in your project, or you can follow the instructions listed here to simply turn ARC off for just the Cocos2D files.

This is my very first post for #iDevBlogADay. I had been scheduled to do it earlier this year, but then something happened. I’m not exactly torn up about it.

In my last post, I mentioned a new project that we’re attempting to do before we hop back on to Sol Defender. We decided Cocos2D was the right fit for the project, as the game simply works better in 2D. We also really wanted to use a lot of the new features coming in iOS 5, which while technically accessible to Unity through plugin “glue code” is simply quicker and easier to access if you’re working entirely in Objective-C.

Due to the iOS 5 requirement, I specifically wanted to start using ARC (automatic reference counting) as I (and Apple) thinks this is the way to go moving forward regarding Objective-C. If you don’t know about ARC, I suggest you read up on it a bit, but in a nutshell, it reduces (eliminates?) memory leaks by removing the need for calls to retain, release, and autorelease as the compiler will handle inserting these calls for you. Apple even managed to get ARC backwards-compatible with iOS 4, so even if you’re not using any iOS 5 specific features, you may still want to make your next game with ARC.

The thing is, if you try to compile the Cocos2D files with ARC, you’ll be greeted by a nice big list of broke. So how do you get Cocos2D and ARC to play nicely together?

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So I decided to take a little time off from developing Sol Defender for a while to get a few other “quick” projects finished. The first of these projects was a prototype that I’ve been wanting to do for some time. I think the prototype was a success, and we’ll be exploring a full version of it in the future. But at the moment, we have far too many half-finished projects to start yet another one.

The other project I wanted to pursue was updating our existing games. It’s been a long time since we’ve pushed out any updates, and our games seriously needed them. As you may have seen from our news section, we managed to release an updated version of Sheepstacker. I’m going to go into a bit of what changed and what we had to do to get this update out the door.

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After what seems like a lifetime, a new version of Sheepstacker is now available in the App Store!

Here’s what you can expect from this massive update:

• Game Center leaderboards and achievements
• Retina display graphics
• iPad support (Universal)
• Revamped UI
• Better performance (60 fps on most devices)
• Gameplay tweaks (extra hearts and time in Speed Stack are now awarded for every 250 nickels)

There is one caveat to all of the great new features: the AGON Online service is shutting down on June 30th, so we’ve removed it from this version. Unfortunately, we were unable to salvage the scores and achievements from AGON due to library incompatibilities with Unity (and believe me, we tried).

However, since we’ve made some fairly significant gameplay changes, the old scores and achievements wouldn’t be representative of the current state of the game. We apologize for the inconvenience of this and hope you can understand that we were simply out of options. We’ve begun caching this information on our own for future versions in case this situation ever happens again.

A new version of Sheepstacker Lite will be coming shortly as well. It won’t have Game Center support, but the other changes will be coming along for the ride.

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who signed up! We’ve got all the beta testers we need for this release.

We’re pleased to announce that Sheepstacker version 1.4 is almost ready to be shipped off to Apple, but we need your help! While we have a very stable version of the game running, we want to take extra care to make sure this is the best version of Sheepstacker yet. So we’re asking you to sign up to become a Tiny Tim Games beta tester!

We use a service called TestFlight to distribute our beta builds and to gather information from our beta testers. To sign up for beta testing, just follow this link:

http://bit.ly/mHSTxv

We’ll be handing out promo codes for Sheepstacker to the lucky ones who make it into the beta test to give to a friend (or to use yourself, if by some chance you haven’t played the game yet). We can’t accept everyone into the beta, so don’t fret if you don’t make it in. We’ll have plenty of beta opportunities in the future.

I essentially grew up listening to video game music. From the 3-second stingers in Pitfall, to the iconic Super Mario Bros. theme, to anything and everything by Nobuo Uematsu, to say that game music is my primary “genre” of choice would not be inaccurate. Oh sure, I learned to play the drums by watching Bon Jovi videos, and there were those odd high school years where I listened to whatever the kids were into those days, but game music is what I love.

I’m sad to say that in all my years, I’ve never tried to sit down and learn to play or write music. I knew I wanted to make my own games, but I just assumed someone else would write the music. After all, they have the talent… whoever “they” are. But I’ve been studying music for a long time. I enjoy the music I listen to, but oftentimes I’ll just sit, listen, and study the reason why a particular piece of music makes me feel the way I’m feeling.

Cut to January 2010. Shannon and I are working feverishly on Word Monkey, trying to tie up all the loose ends before sending it to the gatekeepers at Apple. One of the last things on the list is to find some music. I had assumed we would just license some music online, but after many days of searching, I just hadn’t found what I was looking for.

Then Shannon, wonderful wife that she is, decided she’d take a stab at making something in GarageBand.

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