I’ve been really busy lately, so I don’t have time to maintain the blog as expected, I been working hard on the new game, FormulaNova, it’s a top down racing game, for iphone and ipod touch.

The first version will have 7 tracks, to economize on file size, 4 different tracks (USA, Australia, Brazil and Italy), been 3 of them with their reverse . (Australia, Brazil and Italy)

You will be able to drive the car on 3 different ways, using accelerometer, dragging the sterring wheel and using buttons, I ‘d prefer the last one, the virtual joystick with tap as a button.

Also each car have different durability, and max speed, acceleration and turn speed.  You will lost speed when your car crashes up from it’s limited amount, than you will have to run over a fix point, to get your car fixed and back to maximum speed. Also you can run over speed boost turbos. It will have more effect when your car is fixed.

Check the website, it will be available soon on the app store!

http://www.formulanova.com 

Been a year since my last post, and  now SoccerVirtualCup.com has a year of life, 600k+downloads,  and I would say it couldn’t have been better. The game had a really good first season. The sales still growing, and I got so many positive feedbacks, it got’s 3 major updates only this year.

Now I’m starting SoccerVirtualCup 2.0, and another race game. This year, I have been busy developing some flash games for  big brazilian companies like Editora Abril and Editora Globo.

Next year I will  post some news about the new project, but what I can tell you in advance is, it’s a top view racing game, the game will have car customizations, and you will be able to race against friends, or against the computer AI, the car parts will improve performance, and you will be able to build your own car.

I Still working on the engine and on the layout, but as soon as I got something to show, I will post here.I hope to have it ready for late first quarter of 2011.

About the new version of SoccerVirtualCup.com, I  expect to have it ready by second quarter of 2011, I have lot’s of new features to implement, like player customization, carrear mode, possibility of buying stadiums, trading players etc.

I also would like to thanks all for supporting my games and wish you Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year!

Please keep buying my games!

Cheers!

Soccer Virtual Cup for iPhone

Been some time since my last post here, I been working hard on my first iPhone game.
It’s a Soccer Virtual Cup game  ( www.soccervirtualcup.com ), and now I got to the point where I can start showing some screens, I will try to do a video and post it on youtube and here also.

Basically the game works on a turn based style.  You have 3 players for you, agains 3 players for the opponent, all placed on a soccer field,  you also has a ball on the field,  once your player’s clock start’s, it means it’s your turn to play, so you can drag an arrow for each player, setting the vector for that turn.
Your goal is to send the ball to the opponents goal and stop them to make their move to your goal, so for that you gonna have to predict their play.

Once the time ends, the turn is fired and the ball rolls, the  physic engine starts (chipMunk for cocos2d ).

The game has 3 modules, World Cup where you gonna play against my AI players, Versus Mode (2 players same iPhone) and the coolest Multiplayer (bluetooth), where you can beat your friends.

On the World Cup module you can choose the country from all countries playing 2010 Soccer Virtual Cup.

First level is a 8  groups of 4 teams.
The best  2 for each group is classified for the second level.
Second level is a tournament round. Each team has 1 play against another selected team, who loses is eliminated, and the winner goes for next match.
The winner of all is the Champ.

Here is the screen shots:

Soccer Virtual Cup field view

As said on my last post here, I’ve started working on my first iPhone game and after looking around a bit decided to use cocos2d. I also decide to remake a multiplayer flash game I’ve already donne on cocos2d for Iphone.

It’s a soccer football game, a turn based one, and you have 3 coin-style players each side, for each turn both players set it’s next movement by selecting the coin and moving an arrow to the direction  you want your next move to be.

So I want the player to have the arrow last selected to be on top of other so you can see better where you might be moving to on next turn.

Here is the code for Cocos2D z ordering.

[parentNode reorderChild:spriteName z:(theZOrder)];

in my case I will do it on my ccTouchesBegan:

[self reorderChild:p1Sprite z:zOrderTop];

where zOrderTop is my last Sprite.

Hope it helps.

After looking for the best start for developing a game, I found some diferent ways to go, I will brief list them, couse I did’nt spent much or anytime to have a detailled view of each one:

Cocos2D: Free. The one I choose, as the name says, its a 2D Engine, but as far as I see, not impossible to use on 3D games either (Ex: 3D game based on 2D physic engine, car running on a flat road).

The best of all its totally free, an open source engine, featuring Actions, much like the tweener AS3 Class from Zeh + Box2d or ChipMunk for Physics, OpenGLES for Graphics, also includes Menu, AtlasLabels for text with bitmap png charMap. Pretty easy to use even if you have no knowledge at all for Objective C or C++.  All seems to be simplifyed , I on my second week developing only during the nights, and I’m pretty advanced on my first Game.
It also can be integrated with TiledMap tools, and has a Paralax class. I recommend this if you don’t want to spend cash on a paid engine and want to start on 2d game. Also good for learning Objective-c.

UNITY3D: Paid. It seems to be the easy way for 3D games, but you gonna have to spend about 3k , it seems to be easy to use and as far as Iknow you can use JS for scripting. It’s my choice when I get some bucks from other games and also for a 3D option.

Torque2D: Paid. The easy way for 2D games but its paid, not so much, but like $750,  for me is much as I don’t want to spend more than what I already did on the IPHONE and MACBOOK PRO I bought for developing my games.  The bad is you gonna have to learn TorqueScript, I checked out the language and seems to be pretty ease if you have a AS3 background as I do.

Torque3D: Paid. It’s the GarageGames version for 3D,  seems to be as good as Unity3D, but you have to use TorqueScript or C++.

Irrlicht 3D: Free.Don’t know.

SIo2 : Free. Open Source for 3D, seems to be a good way for 3d games, not a real game engine.  Use Blender for 3d modelling , has collision detection, and some other features.

Bork3D Game Engine: Paid. Don’t Know.

I think might be a lot of others, but for now, that’s what I could find.

Many years ago Cocoa was known as NeXTSTEP. NeXT Computer developed and released version 1.0 of NeXTSTEP in September of 1989, and versions 2.0 and 3.0 followed not far behind (in 1990 and 1992, respectively). In this early phase, NEXTSTEP was more than an application environment; the term referred to the entire operating system, including the windowing and imaging system (which was based on Display PostScript), the Mach kernel, device drivers, and so on.

Back then, there was no Foundation framework. Indeed, there were no frameworks; instead, the software libraries (dynamically shared) were known as kits, the most prominent of them being the Application Kit. Much of the role that Foundation now occupies was taken by an assortment of functions, structures, constants, and other types. The Application Kit itself had a much smaller set of classes than it does today.

In addition to the Application Kit, the early NeXTSTEP included the Sound Kit and the Music Kit, libraries containing a rich set of Objective-C classes that provided high-level access to the Display Postscript layer for audio and music synthesis.

In early 1993 NeXTSTEP 3.1 was ported to (and shipped on) Intel, Sparc, and Hewlett-Packard computers. NeXTSTEP 3.3 also marked a major new direction, for it included a preliminary version of Foundation. Around this time (1993), the OpenStep initiative also took form. OpenStep was a collaboration between Sun and NeXT to port the higher levels of NeXTSTEP (particularly the Application Kit and Display PostScript) to Solaris. The “Open” in the name referred to the open API specification that the companies would publish jointly. The official OpenStep API, published in September of 1994, were the first to split the API between Foundation and Application Kit and the first to use the “NS” prefix.

By June 1996 NeXT had ported and shipped versions of OpenStep 4.0 that could run Intel, Sparc, and Hewlett-Packard computers as well as an OpenStep runtime that could run on Windows systems. Sun also finished their port of OpenStep to Solaris and shipped it as part of their Network Object Computing Environment. OpenStep, however, never became a significant part of Sun’s overall strategy.

When Apple acquired NeXT Software (as it was then called) in 1997, OpenStep became the Yellow Box and was included with Mac OS X Server (also known as Rhapsody) and Windows. Then, with the evolution of the Mac OS X strategy, it was finally renamed to “Cocoa.”

If you are new to the language(objective-C) as I’m, or has another language background I would recommend searching google  for: “language-name to objective-c”

As I have a Flash as3 background, here goes some good links for language transitioning:

http://www.craftymind.com/2008/04/30/from-as3-to-objective-c-flex-vs-iphone-development/

http://hailmothra.com/blog/?p=154

http://www.insideria.com/2008/12/actionscript-to-cocoa—protot.html

http://jwopitz.wordpress.com/2009/06/05/objective-c-actionscript-3-translation-notes/

http://blog.teknision.com/?p=164

Last 2 has a very comprehensive comparisons.

If you do action scripts and have already used Box2d, there is some tutorials, and xcode sources available on the web, there is an open source 2d game engine called cocos2d for iphone that uses box2d or chipmonk as physic engine.

http://cocos2d.org/

http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/

There is a cpp  project to port as3 on xcode called haxe:

http://haxe.org/doc/intro

http://gamehaxe.com/2009/07/28/haxe-iphone-cpp-at-last/comment-page-2/#comment-289

These links helped me a lot.

From now on I will try to post once in a week some of my source codes.

I will try to post on sunday nights brazilian time .  (GMT -03:00) Brasilia

If you are new to the language(objective-C) as I’m, or has another language background I would recommend searching google  for: “language-name to objective-c”

As I have a Flash as3 background, here goes some good links for language transitioning:

http://www.craftymind.com/2008/04/30/from-as3-to-objective-c-flex-vs-iphone-development/

http://hailmothra.com/blog/?p=154

http://www.insideria.com/2008/12/actionscript-to-cocoa—protot.html

http://jwopitz.wordpress.com/2009/06/05/objective-c-actionscript-3-translation-notes/

http://blog.teknision.com/?p=164

Last 2 has a very comprehensive comparisons.

If you do action scripts and have already used Box2d, there is some tutorials, and xcode sources available on the web, there is an open source 2d game engine called cocos2d for iphone that uses box2d or chipmonk as physic engine.

http://cocos2d.org/

http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/

There is a cpp  project to port as3 on xcode called haxe:

http://haxe.org/doc/intro

http://gamehaxe.com/2009/07/28/haxe-iphone-cpp-at-last/comment-page-2/#comment-289

These links helped me a lot.

From now on I will try to post once in a week some of my source codes.

I will try to post on sunday nights brazilian time .  (GMT -03:00) Brasilia

After spending a lot of time doing some research on the web, I found  a lot of hello world tutorials, so i decided not to post another one, instead of it, I did a compilation of some good links I found during my research:

Iphone Hello World Tutorials:
http://www.iphonedevcentral.org/tutorials.php?page=ViewTutorial&id=49&uid=27391603

http://mycodeteacher.com/viewfree.php?vid=objc_iphone_advanced_hello_world

There might be a lot more tutorials, but for instance its more than good.

A nice start is readying Apple documents at Apple website:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/gettingstarted/docs/objectivecprimer.action

I think its enough for an Iphone hello world.

Welcome to Iphone Sandbox, I will try to keep a log of  my experiments on IPHONE SDK.