cocos2d for iPhone

A fast, easy to use, free, and community supported 2D game engine

1. 

   SageGames
   Member

   I'm trying to move from Flash game development to IPhone game development.
   I've had some success with Flash (Whiteboard Tower Defense being the most notable).

   Cocos still looks like my best bet for doing that. But I was wondering, how do you guys lay out your scenes? In flash its drag and drop to line things up like menu options, heads up displays, text labels etc. But what I see so far with IPhone development (cocos or otherwise) is this feature isn't available? I see xcode has an interface builder, but that seems to be specific to utility "windowy" apps.

   Can anyone recommend any off the shelf tools for scene layout? or do you all do it by hand?

   Posted 2 years ago #
2. 

   Codemattic
   Moderator

   I think most devs do most layout by hand. There has been some discussion of an editor. There has been some success at loading svg files which can be edited in 2d illustration apps. If you are working on a tile based game there are tile editors.

   more info:

   http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/1303
   http://blog.sapusmedia.com/2009/08/cocos2d-box2d-part-ii.html

   One idea I like for flash developers is to use flash to layout your game and write some actionscript that exports the movieclips to some format like xml you then read back in in cocos2d.

   So the tools arent here yet - and it will take some work before they are.

   Posted 2 years ago #
3. 

   SageGames
   Member

   Codemattic - Thanks for the great links.

   I think i'm going to go with your original suggestion there and do layout in adobe flash, and export the layout in string. Probably just output some obj-c code snipits or some human readable and type it in rather that trying to deal with xml for the moment, but that should get me through the first game.

   Thanks.

   Posted 2 years ago #
4. 

   slipster216
   Moderator

   take a look at the plist format; it's easy to write out from flash as it's a simpler subset of xml, and you can load it directly into an NSDictionary or NSArray with one line of code.

   Posted 2 years ago #
5. 

   Dan
   Member

   I use a tile editor to output XML, then read that back in my game. Allows me to 1) use tiles for backgrounds, 2) use codes to place game objects (non-static) onto my scene, and 3) assign collision maps which I use to generate Box2D physics objects for my static tiles.

   However, I posted some preview pics of my game at touchArcade, and some folks called for an in-game editor, so I ended up writing one the last few days that saves all the info to a sqlite3 DB. This will allow users to build a level and use OpenFeint to challenge other players with their level.

   -Dan

   Posted 2 years ago #

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