A few of you Amazon mobile application developers may have gotten an email about Amazon Merch. This is a way to create t-shirts to promote your apps on Amazon. Not only can you create t-shirts for your apps, you can also then advertise them in the apps.
I don’t use Amazon’s ad service for my apps, so I’m not sure how it works, but I did decide to create a t-shirt for Maddie Bear.
If you use it for their ads, comment below.
I was recently commissioned to illustrate the next installment of the Huggable Melodies series, Sniffly Sandborn in a Trip to the Hospital.
While we were creating the Amazon/Barnes & Noble versions, we also decided to publish a square format version of Picked-On Poindexter and hard cover versions for each book (coming soon).
Since Huggable Melodies visits libraries to read the books to children, I thought it might be fun if they had a book-related game to play. I found a site called The Game Crafter that makes custom board games. You just need to supply the artwork, choose what pieces you’ll need and create the project, they’ll do the rest.
Click the image above if you want to get a copy of the game for yourself. I don’t have any markup set on the game, so the cost reflects the price set by The Game Center just to produce each copy of the game.
Next up…Drowsy Drysdale!
The iOS versions of Maddie Bear in Space, Maddie Bear’s Jetpack and Maddie Bear Snack Time are now free forever. Go check them out and all the other Maddie Bear goodies at www.MaddieBearBooks.com.
CartoonSmart recently announced a new subscription plan to their iOS and artwork/animation courses. This is a great way to learn all you want to learn about those topics for a really affordable rate.
Unfortunately, the Construct 2 tutorials aren’t included in the plan, but they’re still offered at a heavily discounted rate compared to Udemy.com.
Thanks to everyone who has already taken the Construct 2 courses. If you haven’t checked them out yet, go to CartoonSmart and have a look!
Just over a month ago, I decided to accept a full-time position as a technical project manager in a new city. My family and I packed up our house and moved to start a new adventure. This was the first time I would be working in an actual office in almost 5 years, so it was a bit of an adjustment.
After a few weeks of working, it grew apparent that I would no longer have the time to have a healthy work/life balance if I were to continue doing freelance work on the side. I actually did the math, and numerically, there really weren’t enough hours in the day. So I’ve decided to hang up my freelance gloves unless I ever need to pick it back up for financial reasons.
I’ll still try to keep up on mobile technology and write blog posts and tutorials when I have time, but I will no longer be accepting new clients or projects. It’s been a fun decade of always having freelance projects going on the side, but for now, I think I’m just going to focus on one job and my family.
– Greg
I was recently selected to be able to beta test SpriteIlluminator by CodeAndWeb. SpriteIlluminator helps you add dynamic lighting to your mobile games by helping you create a normal map to add to your sprite.
Since the majority of my mobile games are created using Corona SDK, I’m going to cover how to get started integrating SpriteIlluminator into that.
The first thing you’ll do is import a sprite into SpriteIlluminator. Here I just quickly drew a guy for this demo.
Next you can add the various effects, such as bevel and embossing.
You can drag the light source around and see how your sprites will look in real-time, which is very helpful. You can also use the lasso tool to select certain portions of the sprite and add effects just to that part.
When you’re finished, you can publish out the project and it will create your normal map file.
In this example, I beveled the sprite and then raised the shirt sleeve, nose, and eyes to make them stand out. Then in SublimeText, I created a main.lua file and did a composite of both the sprite and its normal map. Here you can see how a light source reacts to the sprite.
If you set the attenuationFactor to 0, you can see the portions are the image that I beveled and raised in SpriteIlluminator.
And if you reverse the order of the sprite and its normal map, you can see the beveled image.
SpriteIlluminator is a very easy-to-use and powerful tool to help add some nice dynamic lighting effects to your games. This is obviously a very basic example of what it can do, but hopefully it’s enough to get you started in integrating it in your Corona SDK apps.
I’m a huge fan of the cartoon series, Bob’s Burgers. I’ve been following H. Jon Benjamin’s and Loren Bouchard’s work since the debut of Home Movies in 1999. My sister-in-law even got to interview H. Jon Benjamin last year.
In season 2, episode 4 of Bob’s Burgers, Bob becomes obsessed with playing a fictional game called “BurgerBoss.” I thought the 80’s-style artwork was cool, so I figured I’d make a fan game based off of it.
My gameplay is different than in the show and I’ve only completed level 1 (probably with a few bugs in it), but it’s only taken a few hours so far and it’s been fun to make. They don’t show a ton of gameplay throughout the show, but I tried to get the same basic idea out of it while including some jokes from the show like “BOB SUX”.
Periodically check the game out to see if/when I’ve added more levels and enemies: http://gpanimations.com/burgerboss.html
It’s been quite awhile since I last released a game for myself. The other night, I decided I would try to push out a game in 3 hours or less. The result is Maddie Bear in Space.
It’s available for iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, Android and Android TV and requires a simple touch or button tap interface. You collect as many moons as you can and avoid the spikes to gain a high score.
CartoonSmart is now hosting my latest video tutorial course “Create a Space Pinball Game with Construct 2”
If you’re a fan of CartoonSmart’s website and tutorials, go over there and check it out.
I’m very pleased to announce that my new video course, Create a Space Pinball Game in Construct 2, is now live on Udemy!
It’s priced at $59, but I want to offer it to my loyal blog followers at a special discounted price of $20. The first 50 readers to use promo code BLOGFOLLOWERS or click this link will save $39 off the normal price.
Thank you for continuing to read my blog and have fun making the pinball game!
