hackNY Fellows Workshop: iOS Game Development

In this post,  class of 2012 hackNY Fellow and game dev Sean Hogan describes Emmett Butler's workshop on game development with the cocos2d and Box2D libraries.On June 21st, 2012, Emmett Butler, class of 2012 hackNY fellow, gave a workshop to other hackNY Fellows on two libraries he uses for iOS game development, cocos2d and Box2D.  cocos2d is a general-purpose 2D game framework, intended to aid some of the groundwork for game programming, such as managing the timings for updating and drawing sprites (pictures of enemies or characters) to the screen, and handling player input. Box2D is a library that aids in physics simulations for objects within games. Both are heavily-used libraries present in many games developed for iOS and other platforms.In his presentation, Emmett led other Fellows through the development of a basic physics simulation sandbox, which allowed the user to generate boxes and simulate collisions through them, while changing various parameters (gravity, density, etc.).The beginning of the workshop included the ever-important step of getting set up with some of the intricacies of the two libraries, as well as setting up the workflow. After, Emmett quickly led the others in going over basic concepts such as formatting spritesheets that would be usable in the game, reasoning out how to lay out the interactions of the multiple on-screen sprites, and the workflow of tuning parameters of the in-game objects --- all fundamental skills to game programming.If you’d like to see Emmett’s entire presentation, you can watch it below:[vimeo 44487534]Check out the source code that accompanies the workshop at Emmett’s Github.Emmett  just announced a new game for iOS, “Heads Up Hot Dogs”, which is a joint project with partner Diego Garcia.