#beejuice

When I started out to create BeeJuice, I planned to do some fancy 3d graphics.  I started to design my bee in blender, as it is a really good and free 3d software, but when I was ready, I found that I liked a 2d combination of photos and comic style graphics more appealing.

I used photos I made from grass and scaled them to 1024 × 764, using Gimp. Now I created a lot of my scene objects like the bee and my flowers etc.. To create them I used Inkscape, which is a fantastic open source vector based graphic software.

For texture atlases I used Zwoptex as it was the most known at the time.

For the starters, a texture atlas is a combination of a png file with all your sprites on it and a plist file which contains the name, the coordinates and additional infos of your sprite within the png.

Why to use a texture atlas? In short it helps you safe memory while your app is running.

For my particle design I used Particle Designer which is brilliant for creating particle emitter visually, as you have thousands of different possibilities to program them it makes life so much easier to see strait away what it looks like.

For my bitmap fonts I used Glyph Designer.

What do I need bitmap fonts for?

As the process of rendering TTF fonts is pretty high and can affect your frame rate, a bitmap font is pre rendered. So it is much easier for OpenGL ES to push the images to the screen.

After finishing the books mentioned in my last article, I had found a book called Beginning IPhone Games Development. Now for me this book was helpful to understand some of the basic concepts of OpenGL-ES, but I would not fully recommend it! It is some sort of additional source, because, for one thing there are several chapters in it which are just useless, especially chapter 4... The other thing is, that it might give you the feeling that you can achieve a lot more very quick when designing your own framework. This was at least the case with me. It took me about two months to realise that you can achieve your goal a lot quicker, by using a framework like cocos2d etc.. Still I put a link to the book into this article just so you can have a look at it.

I really understood what I wanted to do, when I tried to move the window along with my bee... (Here the link to the free BeeJuice Lite in case you haven't tried it yet!). I tried to get the "camera" to move along with my bee for at least two weeks, it just did not work as I wished it... In the end I thought, why should I, a programming newbie, reinvent the wheel? I checked out what frameworks there are. (Unity, corona, cocos2d etc.)

In the end I decided to go with cocos2d, mainly because it is open source. I found the book Learn iPhone and iPad cocos2d Game Development by Steffen Itterheim. This book is just absolutely brilliant! I achieved what I had done the four months before in one month, a huge part of that success came from the book itself, because Steffen explains the basics of cocos2d really brilliant, in my opinion...  The second part was the fantastic support through the cocos2d community! I would like to mention the two forums I used, one is Steffen's cocos2d central the other one is the fantastic official cocos2d forum. Both did really help and have a very helpful and supporting community! I would like to post the links to the book I used and the all new Editions...

I plan to tell you about my current projects like BeeJuice and my new projects coming up!

My first project was BeeJuice for I-OS I had never programmed before, so I had to learn first how to do it... Not that I am a master by now, but its getting better :-) In my next posts I will tell you about the sources I used, which books I bought and which of them helped me a lot.

But first things first, I'd like to tell you a bit of my first app:

The idea is that you fly with a bee through a maze of carnivorous plans, to design it I used cocos2d.

Here are some screen shots of it:

here is the link to the game website: BeeJuice Game site

here is the link to BeeJuice on the Appstore: BeeJuice Appstore

here is the link to the Lite Version website: BeeJuice Lite