I have been messing around with Cocos2d for a while but decided that, due to my lack of graphic design skills, I would be better off creating a game with Geo wars style graphics. I.e. geometric shapes etc.
Can anyone point me in the right direction on how to get started with this? I know I can create rudimentary shapes but how do I go about getting glowing shapes, particle effects etc.
Any advice or pointers in the right direction would be greatly appreciated, I have thus far been unable to find much information on creating graphics in the style that I want!
With Cocos2d the best way to get the glow would to probably be to bake them into the sprites themselves and animate between different levels of glow.
Particle effects is well covered in the programming guide, the particle designer program they mention makes it pretty painless as well
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/wiki/doku.php/prog_guide:particles
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I'm new to Unity and trying to figure out the best way to create animated backgrounds. To be clear, I'm not asking you to give me an exact solution or instructions, and I would be grateful if you just tell me which direction to look in, and I will figure it out by reading the documentation.
I'm interested in how animated backgrounds are created in 2D Unity (for example, as here: https://youtu.be/OxiGlmV6ByA?t=1075 flying leaves are visible on the background). I only thought of using particles or just creating standard animations in Unity. But, the second way seems too long and complex, and about the particles, I'm not sure how much it affects the performance in a mobile game. Google searches mostly give instructions on how to create parallax backgrounds or moving backgrounds in Unity.
In general, I will be grateful if you tell me which approach is the most optimal for creating an animated background in a mobile 2D game in Unity.
The particles system is well optimized, for what you want to do it will not affects the performance, even on mobile.
I am new to coding, so am unfamiliar with many techniques etc, so please bear with!
I was wondering how you would go about recreating the effect seen in 'God of light' (http://wpuploads.appadvice.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/IMG_5498.jpeg), specifically the animated beams of light, with the awesome 'energy' look to them. In my SpriteKit game, the player reflects a beam (of light) using mirrors they draw. I am currently creating the beam using a CGPath as this lets me change its length easily, and have finished the code for the game without textures and just using SKSpriteNodes and shapes etc but I am clueless as to how I would go about adding an animated texture to the beam, such as the one in God of Light. If anyone would be willing to share any ideas as to the basic plan they would use to go about creating this effect I would be very appreciative!
Sorry its a little vague, but I haven't begun giving the beam a texture yet, and literally have no idea how to go about it.
Thanks!
I would use a separate animation program such as After Effects to create the the animation effect you want and export a series of keyframes. Then I would place the keyframes into an atlas and use SKAction animateWithTextures to animate them. Here is an excellent tutorial on it: Sprite Kit Tutorial: Animations and Texture Atlases: http://www.raywenderlich.com/45152/sprite-kit-tutorial-animations-and-texture-atlases
Here video link for the Arc puzzle
Can anyone please tell me what concept is used behind this game. I have just started learning Iphone and this game is pretty cool. First I thought it might be using core animation and core graphics. But seeing the movement of the objects it looks much more complicated.
Can anyone tell me what kind of approach do one need to build something like this.
That could very well be Core Animation. You could do the whole thing with CAShapeLayer objects. The code would probably be simplest if each "track/sector" of the arcs puzzle was a separate shape layer.
With a shape layer, if you change the path that defines the shape, as long as the old path and the new path have the same number and type of control points, the change can be animated. Thus, you could animate rotating one of the tracks, (rotation transform around the center point for all track/sector shapes in the track) or animate sliding a track/sector in or out.
I am new to iPhone dev and would like to write a game that involves 2d collisions. Would somebody give me a conceptual overview on how the various frameworks interact in a typical 2d collision game?
The candidates I see mentioned so far are 2d packages such as quartz and cocos2d and physics engines such as chipmunk and box2d. What I am not extremely clear is the relationships among these in my context.
Thanks in advance for answering!
Quartz is a 2D graphics API by Apple. It's usually not used for performance-intensive games, because you can get better performance by using OpenGL directly or by using some thin framework made for games. (Which is what Cocos2D provides.) The collision stuff is independent on this debate, since the collisions are usually calculated without knowing anything about the graphic representation of the colliding objects.
The relationship between collision (or general physics) engines and the graphic layer is exactly the relationship between a model and a view in the MVC pattern. In each frame you move the physical world a bit forward (physics) and then you draw the objects on their new positions (graphics).
In reality the model and view sometimes blend a bit to make things faster, but in principle they are completely separate things. Which means you can pick any of the possible combinations of OpenGL, Quartz or Cocos2D as the graphics engine and Box2D or Chipmunk as the physics engine and get a decent game. I'm not sure how well do the particular combinations work in practice - if that was your question, then I've just wasted a few minutes of your life :-)
zoul got it right, I would just add this :
Cocos2d for iPhone provides samples including Box2D and Chipmunk if you want to try them and see how easy or hard they are to use. So you can go ahead and download Cocos2d, then play with the samples a bit to see if it fits your needs.
I'm working on an app that basically revolves around 2D shapes (mostly simple polygons) being dynamically drawn and animated.
I'm looking for a way to easily time my animations. It's basically just moving a vertex to a specified point in a specified time, so just interpolating floats, with all the usual easing parameters. I come from a Flash/ActionScript 3 environment, so if you're familiar with that, think Tween Classes.
I probably could easily be doing this with Core Animation (BasicAnimation etc), but i will have up to a hundred gradient-filled shapes with varying opacity being animated dynamically,
and I need good performance (60fps would be great). So i went for OpenGL ES. Plus I'm totally for investing time into learning something that I'll be able to reuse cross-platform.
So I know OpenGL is only for graphic rendering, and I'm not going to find any 2D animation methods built in. And I heard using CA with OpenGL (if feasible) was not a good idea performance-wise.
But before I look deeper into interpolation algorithms to increment my vertex's coordinates every frame, I juste wanted to make sure I wasn't totally missing out on something much easier!?
Thanks!
I would look into the popular cocos2d library. It looks really nice; supports animation and uses OpenGL ES behind the scenes.