Available on iTunes:

http://bit.ly/knowcolor

Amazing how after a few days away from the computer at Xmas can lead to inspiration for a small game, so after I had decided it had been too long since I had made a little fun game and as I wanted to play this myself! I got started, a few days later Know Color was born!

Subsequent posts will show the early stages of this game before there was any artwork and it looked very very different, and some notes on porting this game concept to other platforms.

The app store approval time was truly amazing, with this game being made available for sale 24 hours after submission, so thank you Apple!

For now though here is an app description and some visuals of the game:

Prove you’re smart and know color. Can you beat the Professor and your friends?

A game of speed and skill where you have to select the correct option matching the Professor’s instructions as quickly and accurately as you can. Post your high score to Facebook and Twitter and dare your friends to beat you! Who is the smartest of you all?

In 50 seconds score as high you can, you score one point for each correct answer but will lose 3 points if you answer incorrectly so be careful!

View a video on YouTube:

You can find some images of the game here

Andrew Girow has kindly made his lightweight implementation freely available http://tinyline.com/utils/index.html

http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/about

Features include

• Scene management (workflow)
• Transitions between scenes
• Sprites and Sprite Sheets
• Effects: Lens, Ripple, Waves, Liquid, Twirl, etc.
• Actions (behaviors):
  • Trasformation Actions: Move, Rotate, Scale, Jump, etc.
  • Composable actions: Sequence, Spawn, Repeat, Reverse
  • Ease Actions: Exp, Sin, Cubic, etc.
  • Misc actions: CallFunc, OrbitCamera
• Basic menus and buttons
• Integrated physics engine (both Box2d and Chipmunk)
• Particle system
• Text rendering support (variable and fixed width fonts)
• Texture Atlas support
• Tile Map support
• Parallax scrolling support
• Sound support
• Streak Motion support
• High Score server (Cocos Live)
• Touch/Accelerometer support
• Portrait and Landscape mode
• Integrated Pause/Resume
• Fast Textures:Supports PVRTC textures, 16-bit textures and 32-bit textures
• Language: objective-c
• Open Source: Compatible with open and closed source projects
• OpenGL ES 1.1 based

Once you have checked out the latest version from here like so

svn checkout http://cocos2d-iphone.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ cocos2d-iphone-read-only

navigate to the directory cocos2d-iphone and run the following

. ./install_template.sh

This will install the cocos2d template into xcode for you, which makes setting up and using this framework even easier!
Great demos are available from within the project itself to learn from as well as the wiki documentation which can be found here

• Hello World
• Hello Actions
• Hello Events

Some full open source examples are available from the following links

• Tweejump
• Gorillas
• Thrown
• Grabbed

The greatest part for me personally is the heavy lifting that chipmunk can do for you regarding collisions and physics for your game, the best tutorial I have found for using it is available here

http://www.alexandre-gomes.com/articles/chipmunk/

http://corporate.scoreloop.com/

Provides location aware global high score boards

Ability to post to notifications to Facebook

Issue player challenges

Cross promotion of other games in the score loop system

Example game Wild Solitaire http://linktoapp.com/wild+solitaire

http://www.openfeint.com/

Compare games with friends

Location based scoreboards

game profiles

Achievements

Example game: http://linktoapp.com/alex+the+fox

http://plusplus.com/

Plus Plus is NGMocos private version of the above tools, they do intend to make it open in the future however

Example game: http://linktoapp.com/eliminate

When you want to have an application that starts up in Landscape without a status bar
the following code snippit placed into your applicationDidFinishLaunching method of the app delegate will allow you to test in the emulator!

//For your normal application execution on the iPhone, this can also be done in the info.plist
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] setStatusBarOrientation:UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight];

//How to make the simulator behave itself preprocess for just the simulator
#if (TARGET_IPHONE_SIMULATOR)
UIScreen *screen = [UIScreen mainScreen];
tabBarController.view.bounds = CGRectMake(0, 0, screen.bounds.size.height, screen.bounds.size.width);
tabBarController.view.transform = CGAffineTransformConcat(tabBarController.view.transform, CGAffineTransformMakeRotation((M_PI * 90 / 180.0)));
tabBarController.view.center = window.center;
#endif

tabBarController in this case is the first view controller given to the window

Hope this helps someone else!

Thankfully we do seem to be leaving the dark days of fragmentation in the Java mobile world behind us, it is fairly easy to get lulled into a false sense of security.

Shai’s closing comment on the article highlights the sort of “discovery” that device specific information, when not in the public domain, may cause many developers to burn time.

To quote Shai:

Applications are expected to explicitly declare their support for touch to utilize the full screen of the device. This is done using the following Jad flags:

Navi-Key-Hidden: true
Nokia-MIDlet-On-Screen-Keypad: no
MIDlet-Touch-Support: true

Notice that the last entry (MIDlet-Touch-Support) is required by current/older Samsung/LG devices but is illegal by the MIDP specification hence fails on Nokia etc. so for support on these devices you would need a copy of your JAD (only the jad) with this attribute added.

Read Shai’s full article, which includes some good tips on using LWUIT on touch devices http://lwuit.blogspot.com/2009/11/optimized-for-touch.html#ixzz0VvlYKZXm

http://www.mobilemeg.com/compare_all_mobile_data_plans.php

and a great infographic on service costs and penetration rates from around the world courtesy of billshrink

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/05/the-evolution-of-cell-phone-design-between-1983-2009/

Nokia graphic showing  them leading innovation,though sometimes maybe a little too early!

http://www.geekstir.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/evophones2.jpg

Seems a long time ago that I was developing on the Nokia 7210, for the simple reason, that although it was not the best phone available at the time, it was excellent to code for because Nokias emulator actually realistically emulated heap memory usage, which was the achilles heel at the time (along with 64kb Jar limits)