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.

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.

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’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.

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.

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 thought I’d kick this contest off by purchasing a little bed time reading material. I want to start prototyping games as soon as possible, so hopefully a few books on game theory and design will help me to avoid some of the mistakes beginners make.