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Author Archive for iPhone Game Tutor

How to Build a Tower Defense Game for the iPhone – Part 8B – Tower Powers

Hi Again! So in this tutorial we will be implementing towers with splash damage, per-tower upgrades, and creep army upgrades, but before we begin that it’s time to get us ready for these upgrades.

Open the source code and find the files baseAttributes.h and .m. add these files to your project class folder, open them and take a look inside.

Ok, so there are a few variables in here which may be new or unexpected, however if they are not immediately obvious we will be using all these variables in the near future. The main categories of variables are, base health and money variables, Machine Gun variables, Freeze tower variables, Cannon tower variables and Creep variables.

As always – Source code AND download after the break
Continue reading ‘How to Build a Tower Defense Game for the iPhone – Part 8B – Tower Powers’

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How to Build a Tower Defense Game for the iPhone – Part 8 – Some early spring cleaning

Ok, so a few issues have been raised over the course of this tutorial series and I have tried to answer them as we go in the comments section. However I feel that we could do with a good clean up of our code. In this tutorial we will be doing a little spring cleaning of the code and preparing for future improvements such as, Splash damage tower, Upgrading towers (real time), Upgrading/Personalizing army stats (between rounds).

Firstly, problem solving:
After downloading the source code, the first thing that anyone with a developers license should see is that when you run the game those pesky lines / tile artifact issues have been solved. This was done by a small edit to the file CCSprite.m, big thank you to DreemLife for your efforts with sorting out this issue. If you are experiencing those tile artifacts in this project, the previous tutorials, or for any other project, then replace your CCsprite.m file with the one from the source code in this project.

Tower shenanigans:
Sometimes after a Creep has been removed, a Tower will send a projectile towards (0,0). This is because we have removed the towers target, without telling it not to shoot. Simply add the following to tower.m -> FinishedFiring method. (This will need to be done for all Tower classes)

Continue reading ‘How to Build a Tower Defense Game for the iPhone – Part 8 – Some early spring cleaning’

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10 Pitfalls to Avoid When Making Your Own Indie Game

When we started making Drop Dead in late September many years ago, we thought we had enough experience to make a solid, fun game in a short amount of time . We had been working in the casual games market for 4 years before that, we had seen hundreds of casual games, and by that point we had developed a few ourselves at our jobs. This, however, was our first game to be released by our new company, Goofball Games, and we were determined to get it right and add it to our portfolio.

The goals were simple – create a casual game for Halloween that we can show off to prospective clients, but maybe even capitalize on the season and make a few bucks in the process.

So, without further ado, here is a list of 10 pitfalls we either narrowly missed or in some cases fell into head first when making our first iPhone game!
Continue reading ’10 Pitfalls to Avoid When Making Your Own Indie Game’

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Steve Jobs, an Innovator and Entrepreneur, Rest in Peace.

“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
– Apple Inc.

We felt that it was important to mention Steve Jobs on our site today – a site based on the great devices and technology he pioneered. We are all very sad at the passing of a man who was a designer first and a CEO second.

Now, I’ve been using Apple products virtually my entire life (starting with my Apple II) and have been amazed that with each new product released the bar has been continually raised. At our offices today we have multiple Macbook Pros, iPods, iPhones and iPads on virtually every work surface. This is not just because we do development with these devices, but because we genuinely enjoy using these products and find them to be essential in our personal lives as well. So, we’ve put together a list of influential years in Steve Job’s life that we think exemplify how much he has changed the personal computer, mobile and tablet landscape over the years:

1977: First Successful Personal Computer
1984: The Macintosh
1985: NeXT Computer – Jobs starts again.
1996: Apple buys NeXT and makes Jobs CEO again.
2000: Jobs introduces a new way of thinking about design for personal computers
2001: The iPod.
2006: Jobs redefines the laptop with the MacBook
2007: iPhone makes its debut
2010: The iPad brings tablets to the foreground.

For a man who helped create so much, we would like to thank him for his contributions and look forward to Apple continuing his legacy of great products in the years to come.

Sincerely,
iPhoneGameTutorials

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Want to Help iPhone Game Tutorials?

and… get your game or product some exposure as well? We have hit over 10k uniques this month of people looking for quality game tutorials for the iphone. Unfortunately, for those who have been keeping score… We’re finding it hard to maintain a company and post regular tutorials at the same time :D This is where you come in…

You start by contacting us at info ( a t ) iphonegametutorials ( d o t ) com… Then you build off an existing tutorial on the site or maybe come up with a new tutorial all your own! You get full credit for that tutorial and it will be displayed on iphonegametutorials.com for all to see. We plan on including a side bar of “Contributors” as well, so you’ll get tremendous exposure there as well. I don’t know what could be better for someone trying to show off their chops in the mobile game space or get a little more spotlight on the game they’ve made!
Continue reading ‘Want to Help iPhone Game Tutorials?’

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RPG Style Game for the iPhone – Part 2: Tiled Maps

Update:  Made some modifications to the source code – changed the title music (Hope you enjoy a remix of Dragon Warrior) and expanded the map to give a better idea of how you can use the space.  Also, I added grid lines to the tiles so it didn’t looks so much like a painting.  More parts to come!

It’s been a while since part 1 – we know from your comments that it’s not your favorite thing in the world (it’s not ours either) but we’re gonna try to get going again!

That being said, if you haven’t read part 1 of the tutorial, or the intro describing what we’re working towards, now’s your chance to play catch-up before plunging forward into the next piece of unknown – tile based maps using Tiled!

As will be the case for the rest of the tutorial, we’re using the Cocos2D framework for game development, which already includes support for the TMX file format (we’ll get to that later – just know that it makes our lives easier!). To build the map, we’re going to be using Tiled Qt, a fantastic piece of software that makes creating maps a piece of cake!

Source code after the break!
Continue reading ‘RPG Style Game for the iPhone – Part 2: Tiled Maps’

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Cocos2d Tutorial – Using In-App Purchases

In App Purchase Sample
*** NOTE: The in-app purchase items that are included in the sample code will only work if you are accessing the US app store. If you are outside of the US, you will have to create your own application and in-app purchase items, and overwrite the ID’s that we specify in the code. Thanks to reader Ben Rad for pointing out that it also will not work with jailbroken iOS devices! ***
Hey everyone – we’re in the midst of a project where we’ve just had to implement In-App purchases, so we figured we would get this quick little tidbit of info out to you all. What we’ve put together is a quick sample app based off of Ray Wenderlich’s tutorial. Ray’s tutorial was based off of UIViews, and we here at iPhone Game Tutorials love Cocos2d (download here!) so we ported this over. Hopefully this helps someone make some big bucks!

Source after the break!

Continue reading ‘Cocos2d Tutorial – Using In-App Purchases’

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Delay in getting these tutorials out

As I’m sure you’ve noticed we’re taking our sweet time getting the next tutorial out – Our apologies to everyone. We’ve been under a pretty intense sprint (even for game companies) and we’ve been pushing out a trivia engine to the iphone most of the last week and now into this week (memorial day weekend didn’t help things).

Anyway, just wanted to give an update, don’t think this site isn’t on our mind and we hope to have the tutorials rolled out soon!

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New tutorials on the way soon!

Hi All,

Just want to give everyone an update! Lots been going on over at our place of business and since we do this work for free, the time doesn’t always seem on our side. If you’ve ever felt like donating to the cause of learning and server upkeep now would be a good time – you know it’s cheaper than a book and it’ll help pay for the server and additionally force us to work even later nights :) Thanks to those people who have already donated, we really do appreciate it.

Regardless of the those concerns, we are still committed to building out new tutorials and they should be ready to publish soon! So look forward to updates soon about our current series on Tower defense, RPG and Match 3 games. We also have a slew of new tutorials on the way based on the feedback from the polling and the forums.

Ok, enough chit-chat we have tutorials to write.

Cheers,
iPhoneTutor

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RPG Style Game for the iPhone – Part 1: Menus

Menu ScreenshotAnd so the quest to develop an RPG game for the iPhone begins! If you haven’t read up on our initial Cocos2D Menu tutorials before getting started, now is probably a good time! Also if you haven’t seen the outline for this tutorial series, you may want to read that as well to give you an idea of where this is all going. This part of the tutorial will be the primer to get us started – it’s important because it’s the first part of the game that users will see once they start playing. In our example, I’m using some graphics I threw together pretty quickly, so please don’t judge my art and design capabilities harshly :) For this series we’ll continue to use the Cocos2D iPhone framework. Source code after the break!
Continue reading ‘RPG Style Game for the iPhone – Part 1: Menus’

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