Tiny Tim Games

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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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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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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It’s taken a bit longer to write this post than I initially anticipated, but I have a pretty good excuse: My wife and I welcomed our daughter Guinevere Katherine into the world on March 22nd. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind around here ever since!

As I mentioned last time, enemies are next on the agenda. While writing enemy AI on a spherical world is mostly the same as it would be on a flat plane, the biggest difference is determining where the player is and then finding the shortest path to him. Since the planets in our game aren’t going to have any obstacles (at least, not yet), all enemies simply need a direct path to the player. But how can you get a straight path on a sphere?

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Now that we’ve split the News and Blog sections of the site, I feel more at ease talking about more of the stuff we’re working on without feeling like everything is some big official announcement. Just warning you up front, the games/projects displayed on this blog may or may not ever be finished or released. Think of it as a development diary, where you’ll see the creative process in action.

As promised, here is the first in a series of posts talking about another of our games that we currently have in development. This one doesn’t have an official name yet. We’ve been calling it “Sol Defender” for the time being, though it may not ship with that name. Here’s a very early screen with some temp art to show you what we’re shooting for:

Click to enlarge

As you can probably tell, it’s a dual-stick space shooter (stay with me) set on spherical worlds (like Super Stardust HD, Super Mario Galaxy, or Ratchet & Clank). We’ve got an interesting gameplay twist that we’re working on that uses the spherical worlds in a neat way, but I’ll save that for another post. For now, I want to give a little background on the project itself, along with some code that shows how we’re pulling off the spherical world effect.

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