[GAME] Top Dog « cocos2d for iPhone

cocos2d for iPhone » cocos2d games

[GAME] Top Dog

(24 posts) (12 voices)

Started 1 year ago by flightless
Latest reply from flightless

Tags:

game
review

flightless
Member

hi everyone,

while not entirely a Cocos2d game, Flightless has just released our first game, Top Dog. It's a flocking and herding game and uses a mix of c/c++/objc and Cocos2d, Cocos Denshion, Oolong and plenty of custom code. We want to thank the various contributors and acknowledge the use of Cocos2d for some lower-level sprite code and for the sound engine, Cocos Denshion. We're prototyping future projects now and expect to be using Cocos2d from the ground up next time :)

more information can be found on our site: Top Dog.

Help Top Dog herd all the sheep to their pens, ducks to their ponds and pigs to their mud! Top Dog is a beautifully designed flocking and herding game for all ages, but kids will dig it the most.

screenshots:

trailer:

cheers,

// greg

Posted 1 year ago #
albatross
Member

Looks really good!
The iPhone image on your site doesn't though (gif) : - )

Posted 1 year ago #
flightless
Member

haha, good spotting - yep, we're updating that :)

Posted 1 year ago #
flightless
Member

An update on Top Dog: we're working on Open Feint Leaderboards and Achievements for the next release...

Posted 1 year ago #
flightless
Member

Here's a couple of reviews :)

4/5 - "A great game for casual and younger gamers." - AppSpy.com
Review: http://www.appspy.com/top-dog-farmyard-adventures-review

4/5 - "Beautiful 2D graphics. Fresh and fun gameplay." - Digital Reality
Review: http://dreality.me/post/549053094/exclusive-iphone-game-review-top-dog-farmyard

4/5 - "Top Dog is a great game for kids but with hard and easy options it is suitable for any age. Children will love it." - TouchReviews.net
Review: http://touchreviews.net/top-dog-farmyard-adventures-iphone-game-kids-review

AppSpy.com video review;
http://www.youtube.com/v/4hgny3yqaJk

Posted 1 year ago #
_nf
Member

cool idea... looks great!

Posted 1 year ago #
two-cups
Member

Good job, this game is great. £0.59 coming your way!

Posted 1 year ago #
flightless
Member

thanks, two-cups :) Cheers for your comments on the UK App Store as well!

Posted 1 year ago #
Dunc
Member

Noooo!!! I've been working on a very similar sheep herding game for ages, and then this comes along, as well as Extreme Sheepdog Trials!! That'll teach me for getting side tracked and not getting the job finished :(

Still, I love the look of this, and will definitely be downloading it!

Good luck with this dude.

D.

Posted 1 year ago #
redatom
Member

Great work!
It's look like you used 3D model in your game layer?

Posted 1 year ago #
azka
Member

I think just graphics does feel it like 3D :]

Posted 1 year ago #
MrLucky
Member

Just wanted to let you know, its on the new and noteworthy in Norway :)

Great work!

Posted 1 year ago #
brendang
Member

Very nice job.... Good Luck in the Store.

Posted 1 year ago #
flightless
Member

@Dunc - sorry! When we started there was only one sheep herding game - when we finally finished (around our regular interactive design studio work) there was heaps of them, so we kinda missed the boat a bit as well :) No doubt our prototype ideas for next games will be released by someone else before we get them done!! Extreme Sheepdog Trials looks like it could be pretty neat - we were going to try the whistle command thing ages ago, but thought we'd stick to the line drawing + scrolling mechanic to get it finished and up!

@redatom, @azka - correct, no 3d, all illustrated and/or hand drawn. There's plenty of work designing and compositing to get the look & feel right... Flightless is actually an interactive design studio and Ali Teo is a freelance illustrator, so there's a lot of design, photoshop & illustrator and coding experience between us. We thought we'd have a mess around on the iphone and this game grew from the first prototype we made. If we get enough time and interest we'll be doing more games, along with some small apps. Also, we're working on updating Top Dog with leaderboards, achievements, extra levels and a few little surprises :)

@MrLucky - thanks for letting us know, that's awesome!

@brendang, @_nf - cheers :)

Posted 1 year ago #
Dunc
Member

@flightless - Downloaded it and I love it! Well done!

In mine, I originally had dogs in there, but found them too fiddly so just stuck with fingers. You seem to have hit the nail on the head with the path drawing though. If I had discovered cocos2d when I started it, it probably would have been done by now! Like you, there was only one really bad attempt at a sheep herding game out at the time, so decided to carry on. I may still add my little 2 pennies worth to the sheep herding genre at some point though, as it seems a shame to waste all the pretty graphics... but I'll have a job matching up to Top Dog...

Posted 1 year ago #
flightless
Member

@Dunc - thanks! :) We played with the controls a bit - the path and scrolling maps were in there right at the start, but we originally had the doggy waiting until the path was complete before running... it seemed a bit strategic'ish for a 5 minute game, so we changed him to run all the time. It was fun watching people of different ages pick it up and just play their way - some would draw paths, others would finger-herd.

Also, we originally prototyped in other stuff... then used Oolong (c/c++) to get up and going with a proper application framework, coded our own opengl render system, sprites, input, geometry and collision, etc (along with the ai/flocking) and actually did start messing with sound enginey stuff in openal as well. I gave that up pretty fast as it was a bit of a minefield and a complete no-brainer to use CocosDenshion. We then switched from Oolong textures (pvrtc-based) to Texture2D in our sprites for better alpha support - we ended up using a Cocos wrapper of Texture2D, but none of the Cocos sprite features apart from the loader. At this point we saw Herd-O-Cows get released (yes, aaages ago) and then a few others, but Top Dog was a bit of fun and learning for our studio so it didn't matter too much :) Obviously, we didn't have time to install lasers onto our sheep like another recent release!

As mentioned at the top of this thread, I think for our next 2d game prototypes we'll be using Cocos from the ground up! It was quite a learning process (as I'm sure it is for plenty of other devs) and choosing a framework back when we started wasn't easy. The new versions of Cocos seem to be coming along really nicely and we've got plenty of Flash/Box2d experience so most of the concepts make sense. It's slightly hard to keep up with all the changes, docs, 'best practice', external tools, etc but I guess I'll pony up and learn some more obj-c when our other project work allows :)

We're looking forward to getting some updates out, too. The only criticism we've really had so far is not enough levels!, so along with the leaderboard stuff we're working on that and some other little gems.

Without giving your game ideas away(!), please feel free to email us with any feedback: topdog@flightless.co.nz, and good luck with your game - email us when it's out!

Posted 1 year ago #
meladori
Member

@flightless, this looks awesome! How long did it take to make?

Posted 1 year ago #
sndwav
Member

Hey @flightless, I just bought the game.
It's very nice. Cute graphics. I'm not much into herding games (or airport control games) but a friend of mine here really enjoys it.

I noticed that sometimes I would try to draw a path and it starts dragging the screen, but maybe it's just me.

Anyways, good job

Posted 1 year ago #
flightless
Member

@meladori thanks :) Flightless is an interactive design studio and our normal client work gets in the way of things like Top Dog, which was our first iPhone game... so it was mostly done in our spare time. From the first line of code to release on the App Store it took about 9 months, but we only really worked on it in 3 blocks of time - the longest was the last two weeks to just hurry-up-and-get-it-finished in April where three of us worked on it full-time. We had one coder, two designers and one illustrator - although, the illustration work was done in a couple of days right at the beginning.

@sndwav thanks very much :) We hope you enjoy a few minutes of sheep herding! Thanks for your feedback as well - yes, you can move around the world by click/dragging away from the dog. When you swipe across the dog or start a touch or touch+drag on the dog you start drawing the control path instead. The dragging around the map is useful when you're quickly hunting for where to herd the animals or when the doggy is running along a large path and you're just taking a peek to see where to head to next. It's also more useful on the larger maps, particularly the ones we're trying to work on at the moment (for a 1.1 update).

@meladori, @sndwav thanks to both of you for taking a moment to comment, too - much appreciated :)

Posted 1 year ago #
flightless
Member

we've just updated Top Dog to v1.1 - changes are;

- supports multitasking on iOS4 or newer (finally!)
- uses DisplayLink on iOS3 or newer (better performance)
- added retina icon (but the game remains SD)
- drops support for devices running iOS2 (sorry to you both)

Run doggy run! :)

Posted 1 month ago #
cocoBavan
Member

hmm.. An update after an year.. :) It means this app did OK in the appstore for this long?
The graphics are great though. Congrats and good luck guys. :)

Posted 1 month ago #
flightless
Member

@cocoBavan well, we had a few requests for multi-tasking and it was easy to do once a few things were updated (from iOS2.x -> iOS5 SDK).

as far as bugs went, we never had a single bug or crash reported to us, so it managed to stay v1.0 for over a year and half which was extremely surprising! :)

it's also nice to let the people who bought it know that we're still around and working on more games, like our current game Bee Leader (http://www.flightless.co.nz/beeleader). When there's more to show we'll post it up here as well.

Posted 1 month ago #
cocoBavan
Member

The trailer is so cool man! :-o Waiting for the app.

Posted 1 month ago #
flightless
Member

@cocoBavan haha, cheers :) We're working hard! It plays better than the teaser trailer looks which is cool, but plenty left to do...

Posted 1 month ago #

RSS feed for this topic

Reply

You must log in to post.