CartoonSmart launches a dedicated blog for all our free tutorials! Here’s why…

Oh boy. Time for a confession. I totally neglected the Free section of CartoonSmart. I won’t even show you how little was posted there, it was maybe 10 tutorials. But over the past couple years I’ve uploaded well over a 100 hours of stuff to YouTube and Vimeo. And as soon as YouTube lifted that 15 minute length cap, it was on!  I like giving away lengthy demos of our videos. Most are many hours long, so to drop the first hour online is no problem. My problem was not promoting those videos properly and the real confession here is that 1/4 of my traffic was going to that free section… Eeeek! (< insert Bender voice)  

So what I should have done years ago, but instead finally did this past weekend, was create a dedicated blog for all that free stuff.  And here she is, CartoonSmart’s Free Video Tutorial Blog (for lack of a more obvious title I’ll call it that). And this will be ONLY for free videos / demos. So I won’t clutter it up (like this blog) with articles on everything under the sun (ironically the WordPress theme name of the blog is “Sunspot”) .

And why follow yet another blog? Well I think the occasional update will be worth watching. I’m also going to be adding some Twitter promos to certain posts, here’s my first and only example so far, but this week I’ll add more. I’ll announce them all in one article here when I’ve added a bunch. And the way those work is if you Tweet about the tutorial, we’ll give you more of it to watch. We upload a lot “Part 1′s” online, so I imagine you’ll be seeing some “Part 2′s” coming soon too.

Finally you might have noticed in the screen shot of the blog below, that there’s a Friend Us On Facebook button, so if you want to connect up on FB, feel free. There IS a picture of me there. A rare photo.

That’s all for now!

Game Developers should watch this video by Nicholas Lovell…

Its rare I watch ALL of a 15 minute video on YouTube. Then even rarer I watch the next part, then the next part, and so on. If you’re a game developer (looking to make money), this is essential watching in my book. And I don’t just mean that metaphorically, I think his blog deserves a mention in my Game development iBook.

He has some amazing stats on what some game publishers have done to make money.

The speaker is Nicholas Lovell who runs this equally interesting blog, GamesBrief.com

Who’s up for some retweets for Chapter 6 of my Cocos2d iBook?

I’m playing around with Twitter marketing (yes, I’m really back on Twitter again in more than just an auto-tweet capacity). I’ve signed up with a site called TwtQpon which uses some internet magic to setup viral campaigns like this one I’ll promote today…. If you give that a visit, and hit the Tweet To Claim It button you’ll get a link to download a new release of my Cocos2D and iOs Game Programming iBook. It’s still in the work, but you’ll get Chapters 1 through 6 (over 170 pages).

Shall ye partake???…

 

Cocos2d and PhoneGap tutorial videos uploaded to CartoonSmart’s accounts…

Two of our multi-session courses got updates recently. My own series is moving forward with the first part of Session 5 which introduces a game we’ll use to play around with some Game Center code (for Leader boards and Achievements) Since this is really just the setup to the real “meat” of the lesson, I’ve made this hour completely free, and it’s a great standalone tutorial on composing CCActions and using Gesture Recognizers with Cocos2d (the Game Center stuff will come in part 2). It also uses the latest update of Cocos2d which is now officially version 2. If you haven’t watched any of the past courses in this series, well you can get caught up by joining us, or you can probably wing it (it’ll help if you know how to make a sprite sheet)….

Resources for this project are available at….

http://www.cartoonsmart.com/code_from_ibook/SpriteSheets2_Fight_Character.zip

You can watch the video on YouTube here or Vimeo here.

And for you PhoneGap Tutorial buyers, you should already have gotten 3 NEW Session zip files in the past couple weeks. Session 6 should have arrived this morning. And now that we have like, uhhh (just noticed a typo on the site)… 14 HOURS (it said 4 hours a moment ago)…. we might as well give away a couple hours.

So if you’d like to get started with some PhoneGap Tutorials for free. Here are some links..

PhoneGap Tutorial Video 1 - Introduction to the Series and Initial Setup. Free to watch here on YouTube or Vimeo.

PhoneGap Tutorial Video 2 -Free to watch here on YouTube or Vimeo.

For Mac Users, check out this video as well. Also free to watch here onYouTube or Vimeo.

Here’s the details on the new courses….

Session 4: Using Dreamweaver CS6 with PhoneGap and Storage API

Using Dreamweaver CS6 with Phone Gap – 1 Hour: 2 Minutes – Learn how Dreamweaver CS6 integrates with the PhoneGap Build Service to compile applications in the “Cloud”.You’ll also learn how to get started with QR Codes (Quick Reference Codes) to find and install your app from the PhoneGap servers. Also discussed are many details about publishing your app for iOS, Android, Blackberry and other devices.

PhoneGap Storage API Tutorial – 46 Minutes - The Storage API gives you the ability to create a database on the client side rather than on a remote server. So you’ll learn how to populate a database, retrieve data, delete data, and everything else related to managing a database.

Session 5: Capture API and Media API 

PhoneGap Capture API Tutorial – 1 Hour: 19 Minutes – This API allows you to capture an image, video, or audio. You’ll learn all the parameters involved with capturing these types of media (max duration, various modes, etc). You’ll learn how to store and retrieve the media. With these tools you could program your own voice or video recorder.

Also discussed are the quirks between capturing media on different devices.

PhoneGap Media API Tutorial- 53 Minutes - The Media API allows smooth playback of audio without slowing down your application. This is a better option than using HTML5 based audio or Flash Player audio, which could slow down your app, or in the case of Flash, isn’t available on the iOS devices. You’ll learn how to control your media with Play, Seek, Pause, Resume and Stop options.

Session 6: File API

PhoneGap File API Tutorial- 3 Hours: 38 Minutes – We’ve saved one of the longest tutorials for last. While most of the lessons you can watch in any order you like, our instructor requests you watch most of the previous ones first because he combines many different API’s in this final lesson. With the File API you can access the device’s file directory. So you can search, read, write, upload and transfer files with this API, making it one of the most interesting ones. And worthy of an almost 4 hour lesson!

So…much…Cocos2D coolness!!

I’m a few hours away from releasing the first part of Session 5 in my iOS and Cocos2d tutorial series, so for you true believers in this awesome coding language, there’s even more on the horizon. If you haven’t already seen it, check out Cocos2D-Html5 (alpha). Here’s the first news on it.  But even cooler, here’s a demo game playing in the browser using Cocos2D-Html5…

So what exactly is  Cocos2D-Html5? Well here’s what the official site says…

“It is a HTML5 version of Cocos2d-x project. Our focus for Cocos2d-html5 development is around making Cocos2d cross platforms between browsers and native application. On top of the framework provided by Cocos2d-html5, games can be written in Javascript, using API that is COMPLETELY COMPATIBLE with that of Cocos2d-iPhone, Cocos2d-x javascript binding. Cocos2d-html5 project can be easily run on browsers which supports HTML5. Cocos2d-html5 also supports running game code in “Cocos2d Javascript binding” without or with little modification.”

Cool, eh. Feel like jumping in and making a browser game??  Of course you don’t! Browser games are soooooo 10 years ago.. But the good thing about this is IF you made a great game for the iPhone, then you’re a weekend’s worth of work away from taking a few levels from the iPhone version and porting it over to Cocos2D-X and showing off some gameplay in the browser.

One of my fantastic students take the Angry Ninja’s Starter Kit and ported it over to Cocos2D-X and got it running on his Kindle. He showed me some of the code changes that were required,  going from Objective-C to C++ , which at first glance I was like “uhhh, looks like it took a while”. But he said once you get the hang of it, it’s not bad. And well worth it.  Here’s a few mugshots of proof that he got it running… =)