Thank you all for waiting, Trundle is back with a new look and some new updates and bug fixes. Here are a few screenshots of some of the changes:

We’d also like to announce another level coming soon that will also be a free update as a token of our gratitude to all those who have waited and given such great feedback; it should be out very soon so stayed tuned. Here’s a quick sneak peek at one of the screens:

Recently we released a free game for the iphone named Trundle. Most of the feedback we received was positive, however there were a lot of people who felt that Trundle looked too much like an unreleased game coming to the Wii called Night Sky. By some form of coincidence, both games decided to use a ball protagonist against shadowy levels; because of this we feel that it would be better to differentiate our character a bit more and try to eliminate any similar level elements from Trundle.

While we are changing some of these elements we have temporarily pulled Trundle from the App Store, but expect to be up and running again quite soon. To all those who were offended, please accept our apologies. Thank you to all of Trundle’s fans for showing support and hang in there!

Trundle is now in the app store! You can get it direct from here

We’ve seen that many have been comparing Trundle with the up and coming Night Sky game for the wii. Although, similar in artistic style these are two very different games with no affiliation with each other…. I have to add though that Night Sky looks purely awesome.

And for those interested, here are a few of the games that did inspire us during the creation of Trundle:

Limbo
Feist
Red Ball
Rolando

Thanks and enjoy! Oh did we mention that Trundle is free, go get it!

Well someone over at the cocos2d-iphone forum expressed interest in creating a slider in their game and since I was already thinking about posting about this; I figured I’d do a quick post about my implementation and just for the heck of it, provide the src as well.

So basically I created a Slider class to start out with; this class derived from Layer and essentially just adds a slider groove sprite and a internal class I’ve called SliderTouchLogic which is a derivation of Menu. Finally, the SliderTouchLogic instance creates a Thumb instance which is…. dun dun dun a derivation of MenuItemImage.

It should be becoming clearer now if anyone has used Menu’s in Cocos2d before, basically in my SliderTouchLogic I override the behavior of the menu, bounds checking and all that fun slider stuff; and then since our thumb is a MenuItem type it’s able to handle callbacks easily. So on to usage.

To create and setup our Slider we do something like this:

Slider *slider = [[[Slider alloc] initWithTarget:self 
                              selector:@selector(sliderCallback:)] autorelease];
slider.value = 0.5;
[self addChild:slider];

Essentially, we just create the slider, set its initial value to 0.5 (values fall on and between 0.0 and 1.0) and then add it to ourself. Easy enough right?

Next we need to define our sliderCallback method we snuck in back there, so we make a method like this:

-(void)sliderCallback:(SliderThumb*)sender
{
	float val = [sender value];
        int zeroToHundred = val * 100;
 
        //do other fun stuff with the value!
}

And thats it! Theres also a liveDragging property on the Slider class that calls the callback method every time the slider is moving instead of just when the thumb is released. And also remember that I’ve hard coded the visual length and sprite files, which you probably will want to change. Oh and one more thing, this code compiles under cocos2d-iphone 0.8.2. All source files are included in the zip below:

Slider Src

We are proud to announce our new forum area forum.mobile-bros.com (you can also select the forum menu at the top of this website).

mobile bros. is dedicated to mobile device development; our team philosophy is not only to develop great software, but to help others along the way. The focus of the forum is to offer a community for developers to share, discuss and ask ideas; so, we may all learn together.

Currently the area contains the following forums:

General – with a Comments area for general topic discussions

SpaceManager – with several categoried areas for discussions and questions about the SpaceManager library

We will be adding content and forum areas as we move forward. Please help us to keep the content growing with your questions, thoughts and ideas.

So its been a little while since we’ve had a post, but don’t worry we’ve been doing a lot of behind the scenes work on a few projects. One such project we had a desire to create some 2D grass waving gently in the wind (side view). However, many google queries later with little to show except many 3D grass effects videos, we about gave up. But then…. we found this neat little site talking about programmatic animations… with actionscript source code! So ok we were heading in the right direction, but what we really wanted was frames we could use in an animation (for Cocos2d), not programmatic animations….

Here’s the link to that site by the way: http://krazydad.com/bestiary/bestiary_grass.html

Well, in the end we decided that if we could programmatically create these 2D grass animations and capture each frame to an image file, then we’d be golden. So we fired up the good ol’ c++ Qt Framework and hashed out a concise lil program for doing just that. It came out pretty nicely and there are a lot more control knobs to play with than the linked site above. Heres a screenshot for your viewing pleasure.

Hopefully the controls are somewhat self-explanatory, but heres a quick rundown list:

• Specify the number of blades
• Use the color button to chose the base color,  use the variance controls to specify the range of color
• You can play/stop/step the animation of the grass with the corresponding buttons
• The Generate and Frames spinbox are used for generating the image frames
• Specify an output location and base file name (frame # will be appended, png files generated)
• Use the sliders to control how the grass moves and such
• Many sliders you’ll see require you to press Reseed after you move them
• Reseed regenerates the starting position/color/height/etc.  of the blades
• Blades are made up of several straight lines, Granularity specifies this number

We also decided that we’d make this freely available, still not sure it deserves a google code page yet… But here are links to the windows binary and the source code with Xcode and Visual Studio project files (you’ll need Qt installed). I’ll put a Mac version up too when I get a chance. Mac version requires Qt Frameworks to be installed… thus an installer is needed…

GrassMaker Windows

GrassMaker Src

Strategy Wars has been released! Strategy Wars involves battling territories strategically to gain control of a given map. Game play allows up to 6 human or computer players. Difficulty increases with more players. Screen shots are below:

For more information regarding our new game check out the Strategy Wars main page.

A few weeks ago we wrote about a helpful little class (actually a suite of classes) we developed called the SpaceManager; it was our objective-c gateway to using chipmunk physics in a more concise way. Since we thought others might benefit from using it, we wanted to make it available to anyone. The problem was, it still needed a few more additions to really be viable and generic and we did not have a global access point for it yet, besides the provided zip.

Well, we now feel it is ready for the mainstream and have given it a place over at google code, named Chipmunk-SpaceManager. Here is the link: Chipmunk-SpaceManager

There are a few new changes since the last article was posted. The most notable include constraint (joint) support in the SpaceManager and the addition of cpShapeNode and cpConstraintNode; both of these classes are able to draw themselves based off their shape/constraint type using opengl primitive drawing calls.

We should have documentation up for it in a couple of days, so hold tight. Also currently (9/18/09) there is no download available, that will also change soon enough.

To get started using it, I recommend you check out the original article here.

There is also an example xcodeproj using cocos2d .8.1 that should help.

As mobile bros. has been maturing and looking forward, we’ve also been looking behind at the games that got us started. Pachingo was really our first game working together as a team, and really got all of us excited about making games for the iPhone. Pachingo was styled after the Japanese parlor game, Pachinko, with some elements from other games thrown in; it involves shooting a number of balls from above with the intention of clearing (hitting) all the green pins.Pachingo Page.

We recently revisted Pachingo developmentally and decided we owed it to all the fans out there to really up up the ante and give them a ton of new features as well as 10 new levels! Here is what is new in Pachingo in what we are dubbing the Evo Pack.

New menu system and online high scores and rankings! This includes a history of recent games beaten with score submittal as an option. You can access global and country high scores anywhere you have a internet connection.

10 New Levels! The new levels feature new concepts including moving pins as well as pins connected by springs.

New rainbow character with speech bubbles

A new type of bonus for long airtimes of the ball, as well as new sound fx for bonuses.

This new update should be coming beginning of October or sooner. Heres a gameplay vid

Everyone here at Mobile Bros is pleased to announce a new game coming out soon called Strategy Wars! Strategy Wars involves battling territories and the objective of the game is to own all of the territories on a given map. Each game begins with your choice of a randomly created map.

Game play allows for up to six computer or human controlled players. Difficulty increases as you add more computer players. Computer AI comes in the form of several different types to keep you guessing where the computer players will strike next.

Below are some images of what is to come: