Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The other tools
Now comes the part where you may need to spend a bit more money to get some extremely
helpful tools (and do some extra bit of learning). In this topic's examples, I use four of
them:
• A tool to help build sprite sheets: I'll use
TexturePacker
(
ht-
tp://www.codeandweb.com/texturepacker
)
. There are other alternatives, such as
Zwoptex
(
http://zwopple.com/zwoptex/
), and they usually offer some features for
free. Cocos2d-x now offers a free program called
CocosStudio
, which is some-
what similar to
SpriteBuilder
(previously
CocosBuilder
), and it offers ways to
build sprite sheets, bitmap fonts, as well as a number of other goodies. At the time
of writing this, the Windows version is somewhat superior to the Mac version, but
they are free!
• A tool to help build particle effects: I'll use Particle Designer (
ht-
tp://www.71squared.com/en/particledesigner
)
. Depending on your operating sys-
tem, you may find free tools online for this. Cocos2d-x comes bundled with some
common particle effects that you can customize. But doing it blindly is a process I
do not recommend. CocosStudio also allows you to create your own particle ef-
fects, but you may find its interface a bit daunting. It certainly requires its own
topic of tutorials!
• A tool to help build bitmap fonts: I'll use Glyph Designer (
ht-
tp://www.71squared.com/en/glyphdesigner
)
. But there are others: bmGlyph (which
is not as expensive) and FontBuilder (which is free). It is not extremely hard to
build a bitmap font—not nearly as hard as building a particle effect from
scratch—but doing it once is enough to convince you to get one of these tools fast.
Once again, you might give CocosStudio a go.
• A tool to produce sound effects: No contest—sfxr for Windows or its Mac port
cfxr. Both are free (
http://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html
and
http://thirdcog.eu/
