(I’m sorry for the long post, I know, I know…)
So, here I am, after short of 10 months of researching on and off, I’ve finally managed to book myself some time to sit and start making games for profit. Now, when I mean “rearching” I mean “reading about just about every friggin’ html5 or otherwise cross-mobile-platform game engine/framework there is out there”. Free ones, paid ones, mixed licensing polytics ones, open sourced, closed source, you name it I’ve read about and/or seen code and examples about it, as well as how it has evolved over the time, what kind of communities foster on their forums, etc.
And after all that, I’ve decided to go the cocos2d-x route for my developing endeavors.
Problem is, of course, I’ve read too much about everything else but not enough on cocos2d, I need to start coding ASAP and I’ve got a couple of dobts that simple forum searchs are not sufficing to answer.
Now, I’m gonna go crash since I’m way over my coherent-functioning-hours, and when I wake up I’ll probably start digging slowly starting from here. In the mean time, I would gladly appreciate any advice you people might want to collectively give me, keeping in mind my current weakness, strenghts and goals:
- I want to make a game, 12 months top coding time*
- The game shall be a turn-based-strategy game in 2D, sort-of-top-down view (2.5D, technically)
- The game shall feature multiplayer capabilities**
- The game shall feature AI opponets
- I have a very solid grasp of C#, a bit more than a beginner’s JS, a very poor Java, pretty much no C++ , and no Object-C at all
- My must-have deployment targets are browsers and iOS, second comes Android, then anything else available
- I’m mostly targetting the local market, which means mostly old devices, so no-plugin, low resource consuming and high performing solutions are a must***
- 0$ budget is all I can afford ATM sadly, so no licences and only free-hosting solutions for me
- Revenue shall be made via advertisements and IAP which’ll remove ads and unlock extra game features
*I know, I know, starting off with a rather big project as your first commercial game is a rather bad idea, but first 2 to 4 months are going to be used mostly for prototyping other~~much- smaller games and getting to know the engine, it’s taken into account in my planning
**I have a solid theoretic understanding of networking protocols and a bit of a begginer’s understanding of Node.js, and I’m thinking that, if possible, I’ll just use pomelo (pomelo.netease.com) for server side (but I’m VERY open for suggestions on server-side technologies
***This is true to the point that up until recently my favourite framework was limeJS, simply for it’s DOM-rendering capabilities
And that’s pretty much it, if you’ve got any suggesstions, tips, reccomendations, personal experiences you want to share or anything at all that might make my life easier then BY ALL MEANS write here!
Thanks!
PS: Also, an additional doubt I have is regarding the chosing of tools. I was just going to grab good’ol notepad++ and start coding away, but I wonder if you guys have a preferred tool for cocos2d-x developing (for any of the possible languages, for what I’ve read so far I think I’m gonna go with JavaScript, but that ain’t written in stone). Also, I’ve seen this page (http://www.cocos2d-x.org/hub) but I don’t know which tools should I go after that’d be of benefit of me… Should I use CocosBuilder (althought it looks to be only for mac and I’m running windows?)? The only-in-chinese-for-now Coco Studio? The alpha-in-kickstarter Cocosino? Is Tiled a good and compatible editor? I’m at a loss here ’^^
PS2: something that is not entirely clear to me is this: if I make a game with cocos2d-html5, can it be ported (using javascript bindings?) as native application to the platforms supported by cocos2d-x? Or am I reading it all wrong?