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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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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Here’s a feature I’m pretty excited about: the mod system. Now, mod systems are nothing new. We tried to implement one for Ratchet: Deadlocked. In fact, my buddy Nathan Fouts over at Mommy’s Best Games is implementing somewhat of a mod system for Serious Sam: Double D. They come in all sorts of varieties, but I wanted to boil the idea of a mod system down to its purest form.

As it is currently prototyped, the mod system for (still tentatively titled) Sol Defender works like this: The player’s ship has a singular source of energy that powers all of its critical systems. This includes weapons, propulsion, shields, and even the item pick-up radius around the ship. As the player “levels up” his ship over the course of the game, more of this energy will be unlocked. The player can then equip mods to funnel this energy into any of the aforementioned systems in any manner he desires.

That’s the gist of the mod system, but to put it into more practical and tangible terms, I’ll go into a few examples.

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First of all, I’ve settled on a name for the game that has so far been called “Sol Defender”. You’ll hear more about that later for the official unveiling.

Since my last post, a lot of work has been done in a variety of areas, but I’m only going to focus on one for this post: the Shockbomber! If you’ve played Geometry Wars, then you know that sometimes you can just get overwhelmed by the massive amounts of enemies on screen, and sometimes you just need some help. The Shockbomber essentially fills that “screen killing” role, with a bit of a spherical world twist.

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