Hey guys! Just a quick question: I love coding with Codea, but I hate running into walls when I don’t know what to work on. In general, what are some good suggestions you guys have for brainstorming ideas? Thanks!
What I usually do is scroll through the codea reference and if I found something interesting, I would base a project from that function/s.
I would look at other iOS apps, also other games, just to get ideas, and think about how you would do them in Codea.
There are LOADS of tutorial sites online for Javascript games development (places like Emmanuel Ferronto’s and others), have a go at porting these to Lua / Codea, despite the syntax changes there’s a LOT of crossover between Lua and Javascript (and you’d be learning a new language - arguably the most important one at the moment)
I usually have the opposite problem, too many ideas for things to implement, but not having the attention span to actually see something through to the App Store. I’m a casual gamer, and read Touch Arcade and other iOS oriented gaming sites quite a bit. I’m not interested in cloning anything outright, but often you’ll see a video or hear of an idea that suggests something, or you think, “that’s nice, but I would do it differently”.
Eg the trend for a while now for very minimal, clean graphics, and the gameplay that that suggests, is interesting to explore. Games where the characters are all black silhouettes, or games like Thomas was alone, where the characters are just different coloured oblongs, but they’ve obviously taken great care to invest them with different character traits through voice narration (obviously relatively difficult and expensive to do well, and probably impossible to do at a proof-of-concept stage), and through animation. i.e. the surface simplicity masks something quite complex. Presumably there’s an iOS 7 “super flat” influence going on there.
Most of the time, the team’s ideas goes beyond the individual, sometimes the individual’s ideas goes beyond the team
Thanks guys! That helps a lot!
Just so I’m not starting a whole new thread, how do you guys do graphics when you’re not using the asset packs?
Are you thinking 2D or 3D?
Sorry, I just meant 2D
@Dwins It depends on what style your game is. If it’s retro, there are a lot of good, free pixel art programs out there. Cartoon-style, you could consider vector arts programs (I recommend Adobe Illustrator).
Inkpad is great (and free) vector art app on iPad. You can get the assets into Codea as PDFs, saving to the Codea folder in your Dropbox is the easiest way. One problem though: pdfs don’t support background translucency. Anyone know a way to get vector assets into Codea and preserve translucency? Or is png (ie rasterised) the only way to go for assets with translucency?
@yojimbo2000 I had the same problem. Inkpad let me save the PDF to Dropbox, but Codea wouldn’t draw it as a sprite.
The vector images in Codea are PDFs, but some of them are transparent still, ie the Space Guy’s helmet. How does that work?
You should be able to draw the inkpad pdfs as sprites. Perhaps you have to rasterize them first by using readImage.
The space guy’s helmet (inside the bubble) is fully transparent. I meant translucent, as in some of the background shows through. Can vector art have an alpha channel in other words.
@yojimbo2000 readImage worked, but rasterizing is still a problem. Is there a way to use vector images without rasterizing them?
Why is rasterising a problem? Are you needing to zoom in on an asset a lot? Did you spot the additional parameters in readImage that let you specify the resolution to rasterise at? So if you need a larger version of the asset, you could always re-rasterise it, or store large and small versions of it.
Whoa, thanks! I think I tried setting width and height with readImage on a non-vector image, and that’s why it never worked for me before. That’s helpful to know, and makes sense.