Today marks the one year anniversary of our game development competition, so I can now safely say that the game will be late. Not only will the game be late, but I’m also about 2k over budget. If you had asked me a year ago if I would be disappointed about being late and over budget, I would have absolutely said yes.

I recently found myself wanting to animate a character’s progress path and initially I thought I would do this by creating multiple animation frames, much like a sprite. After a bit of frustration, trial and error, I realized that creating an image mask was a more efficient and effective method.

To give you an example of what I was trying to accomplish, here is a picture of a portion of my game’s world map. The yellow and line is the path that my character takes.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the game development process so far has been creating characters. Using my imagination to discover how they look, what abilities they have, where they’re from, and how they talk is immensely satisfying. Largely due to the efforts of the illustrator and animator I’m contracting, the first character of the game was just fully completed. I’m extremely happy with the outcome and thought I’d share with you the process of how he came to life.

I was recently playing around with image masking, and I wanted to transition the mask so that the image behind it gradually appeared on screen. Unfortunately, Corona doesn’t allow you to transition masks, but after doing a little research I learned that you can use groups to transition the image behind the mask. Here’s an example to see what I’m talking about.

I just finished up my second quarter of game development and have fresh round of statistics to share with you all. Numbers never lie and the numbers say that while my productivity stayed consistent, less time was spent on programming and more was spent on game design. My marketing efforts stayed about the same and both the blog and Twitter readership grew at a slow and steady rate.

I’ve been working on level design with an illustrator for the last couple weeks and things are really moving along nicely. What once took about 3 days of work is now condensed down into almost a day. We have 5 or so levels knocked out at this stage and I thought I’d share the process on how they come to life.

One of the reasons I chose Corona SDK as my development platform was because they support many devices across many platforms. But mo’ devices means mo’ problems, and one of those problems is creating artwork that scales across all devices.

One problem that I ran into with my game was that my characters and images were not being properly z-indexed. For example, the dwarf in the image below looks like he’s pasted on top of the tree, even though his position on the map suggests he should be behind the tree.

I’m in the process of contracting an illustrator and so far I’ve looked at more profiles on deviantART and Behance than I can remember. I thought this would be an easy process, but I’ve never worked with an illustrator before and I never realized how many variables would come into play when searching for the right person. I know I won’t find everything I’m looking for, but here are some of the variables I’m taking into consideration while looking for the right person.

I’ve been working on my game for about three months now and I feel like I’m in a pretty good spot. I have a good grasp of LUA and the Corona SDK and my problems are more focused on what type of game to make and not how to make a game. I’ve spent a lot of time reading documentation and taking tutorials and I want to share the resources that helped me get started with any fellow beginners out there.

I’m hoping make my game development process transparent as possible, so on a quarterly basis I plan to publish some figures related to productivity, marketing, code count, and anything else that may be relevant to other game developers out there. So without further ado, here are some stats related to my first three months of game development.

Most mobile apps are developed to run across multiple devices, which means developers have to account for multiple screen resolutions. Image scaling is an important part of multi-device support because you want to use higher resolution images on modern, high-res devices, while using lower resolution images on low-res devices. That saves memory on the low-res devices while maximizing all of the pixel density goodness on the high-res devices. Lucky for Corona SDK developers, Corona makes image scaling a breeze with their dynamic image selection feature.

It’s common to see health bars attached to a characters in video games, and in this tutorial I explain how that can easily be accomplished in Corona SDK. And as an added bonus, the health bar also updates as the character takes damage.

An easy way to add distinction and flavor to your game is to make seemingly standard concepts into unique game art. For example, two visual elements that pretty much all turn based tactical games contain are a means of displaying how far character can move and what enemies are within attack range. It would be easy to just make some squares green and others red, but you’d be missing an opportunity to add a little polish to your game. To visually understand what I’m talking about, here are screenshots of games that implement standard concepts in unique ways.

I previously wrote a tutorial on how to create a square grid and implement pathfinding with Corona SDK and the Jumper library, but now we’re going to take things up a notch and do the same thing on an isometric grid. Isometric grids use rhombus, or diamond shaped tiles, as opposed to square tiles. The introduction of angled tiles adds the perception of depth and can dramatically change the visuals of your game without adding much complexity to your code.

A couple commonly used projection techniques for turn based video games are orthographic and isometric projection. I’m in the process of figuring out which technique I’ll be using for my tactics game and I’ve been looking into the pros and cons of each method and how they’ve been used in previous games. Here’s what I’ve discovered so far.

Visually displaying a character’s health has been around for over 30 years and continues to be a mainstay of video games. From Zelda to Starcraft, these small graphics play a large role in how games are played and how information is communicated. The turn based game I’m working on will include health bars, so I’ve been looking into how other successful games have given their characters life. Here is a quick roundup of some of the more popular techniques I’ve come across.

If you’re making a grid based game and you need a character to move from point A to point B while avoiding obstacles, then you’re going to need some type of pathfinding. Luckily for us, Roland Yonaba utilized the power of A Star, a popular pathfinding algorithm, and made it even better with his open source Jumper library. Visually, what we’re trying to accomplish looks a little something like:

I recently bought The App Store Playbook, written by Shane Lee, because Hunters was highlighted and it’s one of my favorite iPad games. Fortunately for me, the other 9 interviews were all solid, and I came away with some good indie game dev tips that I thought I’d share.

I’ve been experimenting with animation and recently ran into a little trouble with spritesheets, TexturePacker, Corona SDK and animation. The problem started when I wanted to animate some sprites from opengameart.org. The download included 89 animation sequences and each animation contained 8 individual character sprites, which looked like:

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks testing out different 2d game development frameworks, and I’ve decided that the Corona SDK is the tool for me. I was hoping there would be a standout framework that could make basic 2d games much better than the others, but I feel they each have pros and cons and they can all make games just fine. What it really comes down to is what makes me comfortable and excited about game development. I’m not qualified to list out the pros and cons of each environment, since I’ve been developing games for all of two weeks, but I can tell you why Corona won my business.

The official winner of this competition (and bragging rights) is going to be the brother whose game makes the most money, but all won’t be lost if I come closer to my end goal of becoming a game developer. Bruce Lee said that, “a goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at”, and here are the targets that I’ve set out to hit.

When Ryan and I decided to hold this competition, the first thing we did was create this blog. It was tempting test game development frameworks, prototype, or do anything actually related to game development, but we know first hand the benefits of blogging on both yourself and your product. Blogging does cut into precious development time, but I believe the benefits outweigh the costs for a number of reasons.

Hi there, I’m Chris and welcome to my game development blog. In case you came directly to this site and not through the splash page, let me give you a quick intro as to what’s going on.