Either I have become a lot better at game dev, or then Cocos2D v3.3 is awesome.

To be fair, I’ll give the biggest kudos to the Cocos2D team. Compared with version 2, the version 3 line, currently stable at 3.3 with beta of 3.4 coming out any time now, the engine has become excellent. I’ve had some epiphanies about game dev lately, but those come so much easier when working with a clean code base – and Cocos2D lets you have a clean code base now.

Being an old man, I rather do my games in good old code, meaning, I’m not much for drag & drop IDEs like SpriteBuilder, which is the vessel Cocos2D comes nowadays in. Not that those are bad in any way, I’m just used to hack at actual code. And also here: when the engine is as easy as Cocos2D, I don’t think using an IDE is much faster. Any real coder knows anyway, that it’s not the writing of the code which is the big part in the project, but the time between coding, when you’re brainstorming, testing, and planning what’s next to code.

I’ve been doing various tests on the basic game play of Pixelem, and once I got that to a certain point, I got stuck, so my brain decided to “take a quick look on Jungled Baron“. ADD, anyone? To cut a short story even shorter, I got a working prototype of it made in mere three days. It’s actually playable! And seems like fun, even if there are major parts still to be prototyped (such as the power ups).

Well, to be fair here also, big kudos to my intern Elma, who is working more or less constantly in the background on the art. This week we’ve been drafting some animations, and there’s a lot of those to be done in the coming weeks. First two animation drafts are already in the prototype, as I was able to whip the character workflows into a fully working shape already.

Furthermore, I had a few hours to think about the scope of Jungled Baron. Came up with some awesome ideas, in my own humble opinion. I need to think about these things all the time, because Elma is on a fixed contract, so I need to scope the artwork so that the time she spends at Sneeweis makes sense. The master plan is to try to finish as much as possible of the actual game (i.e. start scene + playfield scene), and separate out the “additional” stuff for later. This way we will end up with a fully demonstrable version of the game, and think about the implementation of the monetization strategy, additional fun stuff, etc., at a separate step.

The Global Game Jam is on the coming weekend. There will be the Finnish Game Jam version of it at the school which Elma attends. Gonna check it out as a hang-around (…no time to attend the actual game jam…)!