Monday, March 21, 2011

Two chapters about Tiled in cocos2d iPhone book

This book by Steffen Itterheim focuses on iPhone/iPad game development using the cocos2d-iphone library. However, it includes two full chapters about using tile maps and how to create them with Tiled, the second going in detail about isometric maps.

Learn iPhone and iPad cocos2d Game Development

Since cocos2d-iphone has built-in support for the TMX map format, the map parsing business is skipped and instead the book talks about how to use Tiled and the cocos2d-iphone API to get the map on the screen and how to obtain information from your map. This includes things like setting up your OpenGL projection matrix, scrolling the map, getting your player to walk behind tiles and finding out whether a tile collides with the player.

Again I had the pleasure to review these chapters before the book was published, and I can wholly recommend it. The problems that are discussed are things that most game developers will encounter eventually, and the solutions are nice and well explained.

If you're interested in buying the book, please use the provided links, thanks! Also, I read from the reviews that the eBook version is in bad shape, so better get the paper version.