Tiny Tim Games

As those of you who have been following us may have already realized, we’ve put Random Battles on the backburner for the time being. We have other projects that we’re working on that have suddenly taken precedent, and we were running into some game design walls as well. We’d eventually like to come back to the game, even if it’s in a slightly different form that we originally envisioned.

With that said, we’ve got a lot of things in the works for this year. So stay tuned!

We’re officially announcing our next game (and its real title) through this teaser trailer:

You can check out TouchArcade’s first look at the game here. Still a ways to go on it yet, but it should be out near the end of this Summer.

Game 3 is coming along nicely. We’re very close to being at the “vertical slice” stage, where we can actually get a real feel for how the whole game will play. We won’t have finalized graphics (especially on the UI side), but all game functionality should be there and working.

Development hasn’t gone quite as fast as I would like, as implementing the game’s progression system was more complex than I had originally thought. But there are lots of other things happening with the game to keep motivation levels high.

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UPDATE: I’ve now uploaded a ready-to-use class for your enjoyment to GitHub.

Storyboarding in iOS 5 is really neat. It allows you to lay out nearly your entire interface visually, and gives you some neat features that simply make your life as a developer easier. Since our next game (an RPG) is going to be extremely UI-heavy, naturally we wanted to use Storyboarding to create our interface. The problem comes when it’s time to fire up Cocos2D and display our battle scenes.

However, with Cocos2D 2.0 (the OpenGL ES 2.0 version) and iOS 5′s view controller containment functionality, integrating Cocos2D in a Storyboard is actually very trivial.

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In my last post, I listed my 2012 indie game dev resolutions. So far, things have been going well. I’m working on the game that I want to make, and it looks like I’ll be able to finish it this year (in fact, more likely within the first half of this year). The only bit that hasn’t gone so well is “being more social”. My plan was to go to GDC this year and chat with other iOS developers, but due to my day job I won’t be able to make it this year. Oh well, there’s always WWDC.

There was a bit of a setback on progress as my daughter, my wife, and myself all got the nasty stomach virus that’s been sweeping across the country lately. While it was only a 24-hour illness, recovery took quite a bit longer. However, unlike before when I would have a break in development and have trouble getting started again, I was able to jump right back into it once I was able. How was I able to accomplish this seemingly impossible task?! Why, through planning, of course!

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