The game took around 4-5 months from start to finish – bearing in mind this is done alongside my fulltime responsibilities – and caused me quite a few headaches. Here are some of the steps I took to finish the development of the game:

tl;dr – Cocos2d w/ARC-support is essential, use Parse.com for social interaction, use CocosBuilder for level building and if you’re rubbish at graphics, get them done early to keep you inspired. Wicked Devil is available on the app store now!

Mix Cocos2d with ARC

The best thing I did at the start of development was to create an ARC supported project, and import the Cocos2d framework as a seperate library, allowing me to set non-ARC complier flags on it, meaning I didn’t have to worry too much about memory leaks. To do this, I followed this blog – but the gist of it is to:

1) Create an ARC-supported project in Xcode
2) Externalise the Cocos2d Framework and all it’s dependants (including CocosDenshion)

Create a super-powered User class

The game allows players to work their way through worlds and levels, collecting items as they go and achieving better and better scores. Along with this, a user can purchase power-ups and collect in-game currency. All of this needed to be stored so in the end I created a User class which allowed me to easily access NSUserDefaults (through a User.udata property), update or retrieving the required information as and when required. The benefit of using NSUserDefaults is that it is backed-up when the player backs up their phones through iTunes or iCloud, meaning they should not need to worry about losing their progress.

The one negative side-effect of this is that the NSUserDefaults is reportedly easy to edit if you have a jailbroken iPhone. After thinking about this, it isn’t the end of the world if a select few, tech-savvy users manage to amend their data – the overall results are generally positive; easy backup, easy to maintain and easy to update.

Implement the Parse.com SDK

From the beginning, I wanted the game to have solid integration with Facebook and Parse.com was the obvious choice. It allows you to import their framework which contains the entire Facebook SDK with easy to use methods, like authentication and login.

The implementation in Wicked Devil is quite simple – it allows you to send out your score to your friends, as well as being able to see your friends scores. In addition to this, there is an incentive to sign up as it rewards you with 500 free souls – the in-game currency for buying equipment and power-ups.

Using Parse made the process of integrating the social network into the game a breeze and i’ll be using it from now on in future apps.

Cocos2D and CocosBuilder

I mentioned this before quickly, but the decision to use the Cocos2D Framework was an easy one to make. I had previous experience with it so I understood the principals, but this was the first project where I’ve seen the true power and potential of it. The engine has come a long way since version 1 and now feels responsive, quick and lightweight.

An additional benefit of using Cocos2D was being able to use the Zynga-employee built level builder – CocosBuilder – to construct each level in my game. It is a simple OSX app which allows you to position sprites, nodes and buttons in a WYSIWYG environment and then export it out as a level-file – readable by the supplied CocosBuilder Reader. This made level creation headache free & actually fun, and the creator of it is still actively maintaining the app. The latest update adds animation and keyframe manipulation for CCNodes, so there probably a lot you can do with that.

Image dimensions were created Retina-down

As I wanted the game to look best on Retina, I designed how the entire game would look in Photoshop at 640×960 resolution. When I wanted to support the non-retina devices, all I had to do was use a piece of software such as ResizeMe to automagically scale all images to 50%.

Cocos2D has a handy feature in that it will look for all images with “-hd” as a suffix and display that if it is a Retina device, and fall-back to non “-hd” version of the image for non-retina. So that means, as long as those two variants exist in your Resources folder, you can create a sprite with:

CCSprite *sprite = [CCSprite spriteWithFile:@"image-name.png"];

…and it will display the correct resolution! Simple!

Used external graphics company

I’m definitely 95% developer, 5% designer. The graphics are always the sticking point in all my projects, so this time I used a combination of a friend – GeekBrush – and an external graphic-design company – Zatun – to do the initial graphics. This gave me a bunch of PSD’s I could manipulate, make new assets with and a good “base” set of images to use throughout the game – such as UI elements.

More importantly, for a small cost, I managed to get my app looking how I felt it should look early on, which inspired me to continue working on it and not have it become a sidelined project.

Going Freemium

After launching both my previous apps – Wicked Little Devil and Social Break – at a price point of £0.69, I was certain in my opinion that launching Wicked Devil at this cost would convert to very minimal sales. So the decision was made early to make the game free, with an in-app economy which will support the costs of development.

It was important to make this decision early as I wanted the freemium model to be better than a simple pay-gate infront of locked content – my theory is that if you go free, every bit of content should be similarly accessible by people who have paid either £0.00 or £1000.00+. The in-app purchasable content is a simple currency system which allows you to purchase “souls” – also collectable in-game – which can be used to unlock special abilities and power-ups.

Speaking at a very early stage, this has proven to be a success as the number of downloads has increased significantly compared to the launch of Social Break and, personally, it is nice to know that – regardless of profit – people are playing and enjoying the game.

So how did it end up? Well why not try it out yourself? Either get the game for free on the App Store or check out the gameplay video:

You’re a Wicked Devil… and you’re stuck in Hell. This is your chance to ESCAPE!

Use platforms, powerups and reactions to climb your way out of the clutches of Hell and through the deep, dark, Underground.
Watch out for bats, mines, disappearing platforms and distant jumps.

Oh and did I mention… this app is FREE FOREVER!

☆ iPhone 5 support! ☆
☆ 2 Worlds ☆
☆ 40 Challenging Levels ☆
☆ 120 Collectables ☆
☆ 1000′s of Small Collectables ☆
☆ 23 Powerups ☆
☆ GameCenter Integration! ☆
☆ Achievements! ☆
☆ Leaderboards! ☆
☆ Challenge your GameCenter friends! ☆
☆ In App Purchase to help beat your friends. ☆
☆ Compare your score to your Facebook Friends ☆
☆ Incoming FREE updates to give an extra 4 worlds, 80+ levels, 240+ collectables, 10000+ small collectables! ☆
☆☆ FREE updates forever! ☆☆

Available now for the iPhone on the App Store, Social Break Sports Edition features exciting & familiar, Breakout-style gameplay complete with powerups, negative effects and high scores. The flagship feature are the Tweet Blocks which, when hit, fade-in a live tweet from the search term “#olympics” allowing you to play a game along side checking the latest sports news.

To see the original, full game in action, check out the YouTube gameplay trailer here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voM_uNphhfI

To try Social Break Sports Edition out yourself, get it now from the App Store for free!

Created by London-based independent game developers, Wicked Little Games, Social Break is already making headlines with the tech savvy, TheNextWeb reporting that the game “doesn’t stop being fun” and commenting that “this is the perfect app to play during any of your idle time”.

The magic of Social Break is the star-decorated Twitter blocks which, when hit, cause a recent tweet from your timeline to appear. The gameplay is reminiscent of the arcade classic, Breakout, and will keep you on your toes with a wide variety of positive and negative powerups – including double points, bigger paddle and reverse controls. There are also options to tweak the number of tweets shown and for how long, to suit your social reading habits.

iOS5-powered Game Center & Twitter integration means it is easy to compete with your friends or followers around the world.

Social Break is a brand new way of interacting with your Twitter timeline and is undoubtably the most fun. Now you will no longer have to make the tough coffee-break choice: play a game or be social?

Social Break is now available on the App Store. Social Break Lite is FREE on the App Store right now.

Wicked Little Games are on Twitter and Facebook. Follow us for all the latest news and updates.

Parse.com

Parse allows a developer to “add a backend to your mobile app within minutes”. Instead of having to build your own API service, host & balance it, Parse.com allows you to structure your mobile backend using their service.

The implementation is fantastic, the tutorials guide you through your first use of Parse and before long your mind starts racing with the potential of being able to host simple bits of data, without all the hassle.

Best of all, they offer a free service which should be enough to get you started, at least.

Playtomic – Game Analytics

As the name implies, this is a game-centric tip which also works for a multitude of platforms (including HTML5 and Flash), but this is still a great addition to any lists based around making a developers life easier when developing iOS apps.

The premise is simple: you can create custom logging events using the Playtomic library and then login to your account via the website and see your results. Heatmaps, in-game statistics, play length can all be collected and sifted through for that juicy bit of information that your app might just be needing.

As with Parse, the best part of this service is that it is free, easy and reliable, meaning theres really no reason to not add it in next time you’re trying to know Rovio from top-spot.

iOS Boilerplate

This Github hosted collection of codes is the perfect copy&paste go-to link. It is intended to provide you with a base code to begin with, with which you can expand out to make any app you can dream of. It’s not a simple collection either, there are some very detailed applications that you can take advantage of: Geo location, Pull down to refresh functionality, a built in web-browser, JSON and Dictionary helpers… basically anything you need, its there.

Obviously, because it’s on github it is an open source project so don’t forget to give as much as you take!

iRate – Rate my App reminder

An unbelievably simple piece of code to set up, which makes use of the new iOS ARC feature (see below…), iRate allows you to add a “rate this app” reminder to any iOS development project you want. It’s as simple as importing the library and adding ONE line of code. Simple and it works brilliantly.

iOS5 itself: Storyboards & Transitions

If you want to get straight into iPhone and iPad development but don’t know much Objective C*, then Storyboards are the perfect jumping off point.

Using the brilliant Interface Builder, a newbie iOS developer can drag and drop elements into place, assigning click events to trigger transitions to different views. Labels can be edited and buttons can be placed.

Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of iOS development, but it is brilliant to see how much a developer with zero knowledge of Obby C can do.

Check this video out to see the power of the Storyboards.

*side note – I’m not saying that it is a good idea to make iPhone apps without knowledge of the language, I’m simply stating that it is possible…

iOS5 itself: ARC

Purists will argue against this being in the list – but in my opinion, ARC removes most of the headaches involved in developing, testing and maintaining iOS apps. ARC, very blandly, stands for “Automatic Reference Counting”, which in basic terms means that it handles all garbage collection & memory allocation for you. That’s right, no more “object = nil. [object release] etc…”, that is all done at compile time meaning you can focus on the more interesting parts of coding.

Because ARC is a relatively new feature of iOS development, there will be times when you want to use a library or snippet of code which has objects being released all over the show. Luckily, Apple have provided a way to disable ARC running for individual files. In my latest project, Social Break, I was able to use the CocosDenshion library, complete with crazy amounts of memory tweaking, alongside my ARC-overwatched codebase. It appears to have worked a treat.

*this article was originally written for Andy Girvan.com