7. Now make it yours
7.1 Some easy customizations
That was easy, wasn’t it? So much fun, so little code.
Now our game project is begging you to customize it. Here are a few ideas:
- Instead of destroying rocks on impact, split them into two smaller rocks. Make sure the little ones can still be destroyed.
- Keep and display a score. To display text in Quartz views, use NSString’s drawAtPoint_withAttributes.
- Regenerate ships and rocks after they are destroyed.
- Add a second simultaneous player. Decide what should happen when one player’s missiles hit the other player’s ship.
- Animate the destruction of ships and rocks.
7.2 Game making resources
There is a vast amount of information available online and in print for aspiring game software developers.
- Gamasutra is the premier online site. It is affiliated with Game Developer magazine.
- iDevGames is a news and forum site devoted to Macintosh game development.
- For a comprehensive reference book, consider Core Techniques and Algorithms in Game Programming by Daniel Sanchez-Crespo Dalmau.
- For an in-depth treatment of the behind-the scenes math of 3D games, I recommend Eric Lengyel’s Mathematics for 3D Game Programming & Computer Graphics and James Van Verth and Lars Bishop’s Essential Mathematics for Games and Interactive Applications.
- There aren’t any books on game development in Ruby yet that I’d recommend, but for inspiration you might want to look at Sean Riley’s Game Programming with Python.
Please send me your comments and corrections. Happy programming!
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Comments (4) post
Hi Tim, Just wanted to give you a virutal pat on the back for some great tutorials. I was fortunate enough to be at WWDC this year and was most impressed with rubycoca demo. At that stage I had only toyed with Rails. I have since digested a few books and built several apps. I am now a Rails and Ruby convert. Cocoa has been an interest of mine for some time and I am very excited by the ability to write everyting in pretty much one language. Much Respect – Steven
Tank’s (Merci) Du bon boulot!
Excellent. How smooth is the animation? Is double buffering used automatically?
Many thanks for this great tutorial. I have done some work in Java, so Ruby and Cocoa (and particularly Objective-C) is quite new to me. This is the first hands-on, non scary tutorial I have found on how to integrate Ruby code in a Cocoa/InterfaceBuilder setup.