Artpunk's Forum Posts

  • > The two plugins Ive had success with are the Cranberry Chartboost plugin and Verstala's adnetwork mediation plugin. But of course both took hours of fiddling and troubleshooting to make em work.

    >

    I'll take "hours" any day... it's weeks of trial and error I don't care for. The plugin is not free correct? what kind of support is there? (if you have a problem of it all of a sudden not working?)

    Its not free but it's not very expensive. The dev Verstala responded to every message I sent him and he was fairly helpful. I have this plugin working well in Cluckles on Android. But I havent been able to test it on iOS yet because I havent been able to release an update on iOS due to the localStorage bug with Cocoon I mentioned previously. I will most likely be using this plugin for future games when I need ads, depending on what the new Scirra ad plugin turns out to be like. I really like the fact you can choose which ad networks are displayed. I'm showing ads from AdMob, Chartboost, UnityAds, Vungle and HeyZap using this plugin. It's pretty good. I did find bugs with it tho. If I remember, some of the conditions dont fire as you'd expect. Im pretty sure I posted in his thread about that. Not sure if he's fixed it. Actually I should check and see if there are recent updates or something.

  • I doubt I'd ever become a full time app-developer... but I guess my point is, using C2 I don't really think it's possible. The time spent getting it to work is crazy. The trial and error process you are required to do is quite large.

    I'll disagree on this point. It is definitely possible to make good money publishing mobile games, and it is definitely possible to make good quality mobile games in C2! Im sticking with C2 based on the small taste of success I had with Cluckles.

    Basically, I had an effective export pipeline in place with XDK. I had ironed out all the bugs, documented all the steps involved and it just worked. It was repeatable and I could easily make changes to my game and publish an updated version to Android and iOS in a short amount of time. There were multiple steps involved, but the process was stable and repeatable.

    Yes it took time to get that pipeline in place, but once established I could have used it to churn out more quality mobile games into the future.

    Now that XDK isnt an option, we just need to figure out the best platform for building our C2 games with. Which build service is likely to be the most stable into the future and the easiest to use? Cocoon, Phonegap, C3 build service or Cordova CLI?

    As I said before I dont like Cocoon much. I had more troubles getting Cocoon working than I ever did with XDK, although I would stick with it if I could manage to publish to iOS successfully. Ive never been able to figure out how to publish to iOS with Phonegap, although I probably haven't spent enough time testing Phonegap . I would consider paying a subscription to use the C3 build service, but will it be easy to use? Will the iAPs, GameCenter, GooglePlay and Ads plugins work well with C2 and be maintained into the future??? Id also consider using Cordova CLI. This final option would probably be the most time consuming to troubleshoot, but once you had the pipeline in place you'd be entirely self-sufficient I guess?

  • thank you! btw love your game [fixed]Cluckles..[/fixed] (my son plays it all the time - although he's always rage quitting -haha)

    Thanks

    There's something about a f2p game though and what it's become with kids. There's a certain expectation nowadays - mobile games should be free (not all) and ads are how you play for free. Any kid will take that deal.

    Yeah absolutely, people are more likely to grab nice looking free games. So we have to monetise in that case with ads and possibly iAPs. Its definitely possible to make money with the f2p model and if you get a good sized user base, you can potentially use your free games to direct traffic to premium paid games.

  • Hey op I feel your pain!!! Ive come to commiserate and join in your rant! Reading your post was like reading a list of my own experiences.

    I had a perfect workflow with XDK, then had to migrate to Cocoon same as you. Discovered there was some bug preventing data being written to localStorage on iOS, so was just unable to update my game for iOS... Apparently that issue *may* have been resolved (I just checked on the cocoon forum and some new info has been posted since I last checked) so I guess Ill go try again when I have time.

    I'm not a huge fan of Cocoon tbh (I preferred XDK). I am considering whether to move over to either C3 build service or maybe Cordova CLI, and compile on my own PC? That might be a good option.

    One thing Ive learned is you have to be meticulous with note-taking. Exactly for that situation you described where you manage to export a working apk / ipa. Then next time round you get a failure of some kind and you can't remember how you succeeded previously because there are so many bloody variables involved that its impossible to remember everything.

    Now I make certain to write down my work flow... step by step, so I can always come back to it weeks / months later and achieve the same result. Its imperative. I have a crappy memory at the best of times, so if I don't write it all down Im bound to forget. I use OneNote for recording all my game dev notes.

    Oh and I tried that Appodeal ad plugin too. I was unable to get it working how I wanted so I ditched it. The two plugins Ive had success with are the Cranberry Chartboost plugin and Verstala's adnetwork mediation plugin. But of course both took hours of fiddling and troubleshooting to make em work.

    Id say don't give up your game dev. You have to keep at it. You just gotta get a good work flow in place. Like you mentioned, once youve got a good work flow sorted out it can be reasonably straight forward to get your game built (although I agree there are waaaaay too many steps involved... its even worse for iOS!).

    I think charging a flat fee for your app is a reasonable idea, and easier obviously because u dont have to stuff around with ads and iAPs, but I think it can only work if you can figure out how to direct traffic to it. If you can generate a user base on your free games first, you may be able to persuade them to buy your paid games too. Otherwise you are relying on people finding it organically or being featured or something. Id say you have the right idea about trying to get a few f2p games with ads published first.

  • Is there a way to preserve dictionary data from being included in the save state when using System Save / Load? There is a No Save behaviour that can be added to sprites, but I need to achieve a similar thing for data stored in a dictionary.

    I have a fairly ugly work-around happening at the moment where, following a System > Save event, values that are changed and stored in a dictionary are saved to LocalStorage. Then following System > Load, these new values are read from LocalStorage and put back into the relevant dictionaries, but this is not ideal because there is a fraction of a second where, on System > Load, values revert to the saved state, before being updated to the values stored in LocalStorage... it's just not a good way of doing it I guess. It would be better if I could stop that data being changed back to the saved state somehow?

    Im aware of rex's plugin 'instance bank', but if I understand properly I would need to go through and specify all objects to be included in a saved state, leaving out dictionaries? I think it would be hard to make this plugin recreate the way the native System Save / Load functions work, so im hesitant to head off down that route.

    Basically the native System Save / Load works great, but I would just really love to be able to exclude data in a single dictionary (or possibly all dictionaries) from being affected. Is this possible?

  • Obviosly Cranberys plugin do not support fetching the leaderboard either. Really really disappointing!

    Well I see there are actions in the CordovaGame plug to 'show leaderboard'. So thats not what you want?

    Or you're saying you want to be able to customise how the leaderboard is shown in your game?

  • The cranbery plug I have not tested, does it work with native GooglePlay sign in (like cocoon) AND does it have actions for requesting scores/data etc (like the regular Scirra GooglePlay plugin) ?

    Sorry for delayed response. In my testing with Cranberry CordovaGame plugin and Cocoon GooglePlay plugin I have only used the conditions / actions related to logging in and unlocking achievements. I haven't played with leaderboards in my games yet.

    The CordovaGame plugin does login in a similar way to the Cocoon plugin, at least from the user's perspective they both look very similar in terms of the types of notifcations you see etc.

    As for what options there are to access leaderboard info, I posted a pic showing the conditions / actions available within CordovaGame, in case thats useful:

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  • Thanks Andy. I'm hoping to have it finished by around Nov this year. See how we go.

  • Ive been working on making smashable crates, loot and a currency system.

    At first I tried to use the bullet behaviour to create the effect of the loot popping up out of the smashed crate, but I couldnt get that working the way I wanted. The coins would bounce on the platforms, then just fall through.

    In the end I added the physics behaviour to the loot (this is my first time experimenting with physics). It achieves the look I wanted, but I'm worried it might impact performance on mobile. There will only ever be 10-20 loot items on screen at once I guess, and they are inactive once they come to rest, so I hope that wont have too much impact? Regardless I'll have to test performance on some mobile devices soon... which means figuring out Phonegap I guess...

  • PhoneGap Build has always been an alternative service and is still running.

    How about the C3 build service Ashley? Any ETA on when that could be available for C2 projects?

  • -Added new animations for player character (run, idle, jump, attack).

    -Developed hitpoint system.

    -Made powerups to restore hitpoints (health) and also to increase lifepoints (ie total number of hp).

    Powerups:

    red skull: increase hitpoints by 1

    heart skull: restore hitpoints back to full (3 in the demo gif)

    flaming skull: increase lifepoints (total hp) by 1

  • Hi ihvan020 thanks for buying Cluckles, I appreciate the support I did most of the game myself. I made all the artwork and I did the programming (event system). I didn't do the music though, I contracted a guy to make the music for me.

    I used C2 to make Cluckles. C3 wasn't released then. And my current Barbarian project is also being built in C2 as it builds on top of my Cluckles project.

  • Artpunk I love the looks of the game. I cant wait untill its finished. Just 1 question how did you get the blood destroying effects when the player hist the enemy?

    Hi LaurenceBedford thats using particle effects. I have a couple of different particle effects for blood when enemy is hit, and an additional green one when enemy is destroyed. Ill probably update these a bit down the track.

  • haha, very nice.

    hehe I still need to improve the jump animation like you suggested.

    Artpunk Looks fantastic! Nice job, it's like you have taken the best parts from cluckles adventures and added a whole new dimension and depth. Looking forward to see more

    Hey Anonnymitet , yeah I am totally building on Cluckles. I started with the last build of Cluckles and swapped out the artwork and soon Ill try to build in some additional features like currency and an inventory for weapons / items.

    Im thinking I can build a series of mobile platform games, all with different themes and slightly different gameplay mechanics etc. Hopefully I can build up a portfolio.

  • Heres a mockup showing some updated artwork.

    -Updated character design (gave him some armour).

    -Improved tileset colours.

    -Made a better background (2 layer parallax)

    -Added dummy ui elements (player lives, coins, pause)

    The UI elements are just static sprites at this point to see if it looks any good. I havent set up the events for the player health or currency system.

    I think the character looks better with armour... Im not sure if I want to make the armour up-gradable because it will be be tricky managing animations for different sets of armour. Im still thinking about what to do there...