I wanted to share with you my latest, late-night creation - The Three Little Pigs. A cursory search through YouTube just moments ago informed me that I wasn't the only one with that idea. Nonetheless, here is a preview and I hope you get a chance to check it out once it becomes available.
Interesting tid bits:
* x-Ray vision: I used to love xRay as a kid and when I was making "The Little Mermaid" book, someone asked me how those pages actually worked. I thought it would be cool to _see_ how interactive books worked, so I came up with this little adventure. Basically, any mechanical page has an "xray" button, that shows you the physics objects underneath as a collection of gears and pulleys.
* Multi-device support: The final product comes with all assets for the iPad, and some assets for iPhone, and iPhone retina displays. The code looks for assets at run time, finds the one that's closest to the device's needs and scales it accordingly. This allowed me to create device-specific assets when sharpness was an issue, but just rely on scaled up/down versions when it wasn't. I realize that now Cocos2D does all of this automagically. Unfortunately for me, I worked with an older build.
* Sprite batches: I wasn't sure whether and how to best divide assets into sprite sheets and individual textures. So, I invested a couple of days into a piece of code that looks for image assets as both individual textures and as texture sheets. That way, I could just look up "pig.png" and not worry about how and where it was stored. The loading code would hand me back a CCSprite instance and automatically create a sprite sheet for it or add it to one if it already existed.
This turned out to be a really useful setup because half-way through development, I noticed that my frame rate was down in the toilet (~30 FPS). I started reshuffling what images are stored where (textures vs. one or more texture sheets) and within a couple of hours I managed to find an optimal distribution of images that didn't bring the loading time to a halt and shot me back up to 60 FPS even with several large textures on the screen. Interestingly enough, the image distribution across textures wasn't particularly logical. Having the ability to play with the setup without having to touch the code was very useful.
* Trailer: The most sophisticated video equipment I own is the new iPod Touch I just bought two weeks ago. Since it comes with an HD camera, I strapped it onto a tripod with a whole lot of velcro and some rubber bands and shot the trailer with it earlier this week. The setup was horribly geriatric, but the video from that little device was surprisingly great. Who knew?
Anyway, here are some screen shots:
And here is a video for you:
I'll let you know once it becomes available and I'll be sure to post a couple of promo codes as well.
