Tiny Tim Games

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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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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So it’s been a while since I’ve written anything for #iDevBlogADay, or indeed this blog in general. But it’s a brand new year, and thus a chance for new beginnings!

This post is going to be about my indie game development New Year’s Resolutions; three things that I’ve resolved myself to doing in 2012 for Tiny Tim Games. If nothing else, it’ll give a sense of where I would hopefully like to go this year, and also possibly motivate you to make your own indie game dev resolutions.

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I’m taking a break from my Cocos2D-related posts for this #iDevBlogADay entry. With that said, while this post will be talking specifically about creating Unity plugins, the knowledge can still be used to aid in creating standalone plugins for Cocos2D as well.

So you’re writing your Unity plugin to do some cool native functionality, but you really need it to do some work right when the app launches. There are usually two ways to solve this problem: 1) Create an “init” function that you call from Unity script when your first scene is loaded, or worse 2) modify application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions: directly. Technically, there’s a third option too, involving creating a category of the AppController delegate and “overriding” application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:. The OpenFeint Unity plugin uses this method, actually, but as I mentioned in a previous post, this has some serious drawbacks, especially if you want to use the technique more than once (and yes, I realize I’m the one who originally wrote that plugin… I didn’t know!).

I’d like to introduce you to the UIApplicationDidFinishLaunchingNotification key, something which has become a good friend of mine.

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If  you’re using Cocos2D, for the most part you’ll be using CCSprite and other CCNode-derived classes as is. If you need to make extensions to these classes, you simply make a subclass derived from those classes and write only what you need.

But what if you need to extend CCNode itself? You could subclass CCNode, but then CCSprite and other subclasses wouldn’t get the benefits of your subclass. You could modify the CCNode source code, but if you update to a future version of Cocos2D, you’re likely to run into merge problems or (worse) lose all of your changes.

This is where we can leverage the fact that Cocos2D is written in Objective-C. The language provides lots of excellent features that allow us to extend a pre-existing class without subclassing.

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