Lets get this out of the road right up front…I’m a tight ass when it comes to spending money on development resources. I’m still dipping my toe in the water to get a feel for the mobile development platform and trying to gauge the effort / reward ratios and as such don’t really want to drop a heap of money to produce something. So below is a list of resources I’ve used or intend to at some stage for my game Apple Bin. Hopefully this will be useful to someone. 

Font

Having a custom font for your app really gives it a unique style. Font Squirrel has some top quality fonts, all you need to do is find the one for you!

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/

 

Graphics

There are a fair few free graphics sites out and about. I’ve found this one to be good as a starting point for a lot of vector graphics. I think I’ve got about 4-5 elements from here but have altered them before putting them in Apple Bin

http://www.clker.com/

 

Audio

Kevin McLeod has some amazing tracks suited to games of all shapes and sizes. The interface is a bit clunky but stick with it and listen to the tracks on there and i’m sure you’ll find something to suit your game or app.

http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/

 

Lots of great sound effects in here. Grab Audacity to strip down the audio and customise it.

http://www.freesound.org/

 

Tools

Expression Encoder

Microsoft has pulled support for the Expression studio but i think this is an excellent tool for getting something together quickly and easily.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=24601

 

Game High Scores

This is a free service, I’ve always intended to incorporate this but have never got around to it. From all reports, easy to use and did i mention it was free? 🙂

http://mogade.com/

 

Physics Engine

Based on the box2D engine, really active community and some really talented contributors.

http://farseerphysics.codeplex.com/

 

Allows you to use the Farseer engine and setup everything in blend. This is what I’ve been using for Apple Bin and have found it great.

http://physicshelper.codeplex.com/

 

*Not free but awesome

 

Audio

Check out the artist Soundroll in here. Tracks are about $10-15 but they all top quality.

http://audiojungle.net/

After some feedback from the good people of Reddit  I’ve been working on some graphical updates to Apple Bin.

Digging back through my old files i found i’m onto my third iteration for a lot of these elements. The process is still evolving, I’m gradually getting better at vector graphics and coming up with a consistent style.

Some progress screens for some new particle effects i’m working on.

 

 

For the first level of Apple Bin, I wanted to create a big dirty finger on screen to tell people where they have to tap to launch and apple. It should fade in and out to draw their attention to it. So to do this I want to create a function that will animate the alpha of the object / sprite on screen. Enter sin(x):

The sin function is perfect for this, it creates a smooth transition from state to state. The function sin(x) will give you values from -1 to 1 which is also great for this particular instance as I didn’t want it on screen the entire time. For the negative component it won’t be visible as you can’t have a negative alpha. Now to do this in GameMaker, create a sprite and an associated object.

Add a create event to your object and add this code:


///Setup Objects for Dirty Finger
image_alpha = 0

//This will be the value we use with the sin function
xValue = 0;

//Increment by one degree (converted to radians) each time / step
increment = degtorad(1);

 

Also add a step event and add this code to the step event:

 

//Add the one degree increment to x
xValue+=increment;

//Now use the sin function to get the new alpha
newAlpha = sin(xValue);

//Set it to our image
image_alpha = newAlpha;

 

And that’s pretty much is, if all your ducks are lined up you should get something like this:

And if your an idiot like me and animate the wrong property you can get some freaky results:

OK, so it’s not a feature but everyone’s got to start somewhere right? Nice to be mentioned in a site I read pretty much every day.

I’ll keep an eye on the stats over the next few days to see if there are any spikes.

Here’s the link.

I’m re-doing a couple of particle effects that I wasn’t entirely happy with using the built in GameMaker Particle System effects.

This has been pretty easy so far, i’m using a tool called Sparks that Nocturne over at the GM forums has created and been kind  enough to share.

It allows you to play around with graphical effects and tweak them on the fly.

There is also a good write up over on the yoyogames wikki Beginners Guide to Particles

Here are a couple of previews:

Apple Bin has just been released out into the wild. The hot new Android Game is available now on the play store.

The process of submitting the game to the Google play store has been a dream compared to submitting my other stuff to Windows Phone / Store. Still to early to get any sort of meaningful stats out of it, but rest assured I will be hitting F5 every 3 minutes to make sure I don’t miss any updates. 🙂

And now begins the task of annoying journalists, pestering forums and generally making a nuisance of myself.

I’m a one man wolf pack when it comes to development. I generally squeak in a couple of hours in a night when the kids have gone to bed. My time is very precious, in order to get anything out the door i know it’s going to be months to tick all the boxes. GameMaker has probably halved the time it would have taken to get my games out, that coupled with the fact that you can easily and rapidly prototype mechanics to see if they’re fun or not is a massive bonus.

The deployment options are amaizing, i bought the full suite when it came on sale recently. I’d previously been just working with the android / windows export options but once i had the additional modules i selected HTML5 and there it was
my game over the web! For me to actually code that from scratch would have taken months. I’ve been able to pop this on dropbox and have friends check out the new levels and do QA testing for free muhaha. Is it perfect? Well no, there are some quirks with the HTML5 physics engine, my GUI crashed once and i lost a nights work but you able able to submit bug reports and see how they’re tracking. There haven’t been any show stoppers so far and it seems like the support guys are making progress on the bugs I’ve submitted. The only other major drawback is the debugging, you’ve got to use a show message box dialog to determine what a variable’s value is which can be a pain in the ass. I believe that this is marked to be improved in a future version though.

The other option i considered was unity, this is also an amazing tool but seemed like it was a bit of overkill for the 2D games i had planned. That and the cost is almost double. When you’ve got a shoestring budget (if any) this matters.

So, should you buy it…yes!