Road to cobagames part 3
…story continued from Road to cobagames part 2
I had a (bookish) working knowledge of cocos2d framework, only thing I needed was the following:
- A game concept.
- A co-founder.
One thing I had learned after reading all these motivational articles was, never try a start-up on your own, find a co-founder for your start-up who can compliment your work and dream. I approached a friend of mine (David Ly) who used to work with me couple of years ago. He is a gamer and has a creative brain. I told him about my vision to get into game development and how I have been learning this framework. Since he already had a passion for gaming, I did not had to work hard to persuade him. We started discussing about game concepts in a few weeks time and agreed on a concept of (some kind of) ninja game. The reason we reached this decision was that, we both loved to watch manga in our spare times. Now, we had a game concept and a co-founder. Next question in the queue was "which gaming platform are we going to use?". I am an apple fan, and the fact I chose cocos2d platform was it was based on Objective C. David had an Android (Samsung S3) phone he wanted to build a game we could deploy cross platform. This was our first conflict as co-founders. After few discussions I had to back down and the hunt for a cross platform framework was on.
Luckily we found "cocos2d-x" framework. Cocos2d-x guys had ported cocos2d platform from Objective C to C++. Good news was we settled on a platform, bad news was C++, yes I had to freshen up on another programming language in addition to Objective C :). While this was a big pain, this was the only logical path for us to move forward. I had a few challenges in-front of me, refresh my C++ memory and convert my cocos2d knowledge to cocos2d-x. This platform was fairly new and the only book I had found on this was "Learning cocos2d-x by examples". It took me a few weeks to get my head around this platform and create MVC design as mentioned in my previous post. Now that we were ready to roll, next hurdle was the major one, "Graphic Design" :). David had some basic knowledge on this, but we did not wanted to settle for anything less than perfect, knowing how important graphic design is in gaming. I will write more on how we got around this hurdle in my next post :)
continue reading Road to cobagames part 4…
