Multi Scene and Multi Level Tutorial

Due to frequent requests from our community we added a tutorial on how to make a game with multiple scenes and multiple levels. We also extracted an application template out of it: After selecting “File/New Project” in Qt Creator you will see the V-Play Multi Scene Multi Level Template already set up with a MainMenuScene, CreditsScene, LevelSelectionScene and multiple levels. It also supports the Android back button and a nice animation when switching between scenes:

New Demo Games: BalloonPop and Breakout

To make starting with V-Play as easy as possible we added a new tutorial on how to make a simple BalloonPop game. The game idea and its image and audio resources are from the Corona tutorial on Ray Wenderlich’s site http://www.raywenderlich.com/22064/how-to-make-a-simple-game-with-corona. The very same game takes only 104 lines of code with V-Play, which is slightly less compared to the 111 loc with Corona:

BalloonPop is played in business meetings as well

As game creation is just too much fun, we couldn’t stop but added another open-source game you can use as a reference for learning or as a starting point for your own game: a Breakout game with the aim to kill all zombies and staying alive. The game also has its origin in a Ray Wenderlich tutorial on how to make a Breakout game with Corona. The full source code consists of 276 lines of code in V-Play, compared to 288 in Corona.

New Components: LineItem & PolygonItem

The new LineItem component allows, well, to draw a line between multiple points easily. You can scale it, set its width or adjust the color to draw any lines or polygons you can imagine. If you prefer the polygon to be filled, just use the PolygonItem.

Pro users can update to the latest daily build version to get access to the source code of the new demos and to the new level editor now. As we announced in the last blog post, there is a 20% discount for the Pro Plan available this week until 12^th of May. Just send us an email to specials@v-play.net to grab your promo code.

(BalloonPop image was edited with breezi)

Cutting development time

The V-Play level editor helps you to create multiple levels easily. The cool thing is, you can immediately play and test if the levels are fun while the game is running. A level usually consists of entities placed in the level in a challenging and fun way. It also consists of game-specific parameters like damage values, timer settings, or the available lives in the level. Watch the video below to see the level editor in action in the released game Squaby or download it from the App Stores here.

The level editor allows you to change any properties while the game is running! Just imagine testing different gravity settings for a physics-based game and see the objects adopt to the change while you are moving a slider. Or adjusting the applied force of a jumping character without restarting the game and test the different settings. This is where the ItemEditor component comes into play: It exports the current settings to the level you create. We provided a snapshot of the ItemEditor when we released the V-Play particle editor. The particle editor was made solely with the ItemEditor component in a matter of days – just have a look at the source code to see how easily the editor can be implemented.

Give your players the power to create own levels

So the level editor saves a lot of time during development of your game as it cuts down the testing and balancing phase and simplifies content creation. However, there’s even more: as you already have an interface in place to create levels while the game is running, you can take it one step further: Give your players the power to create their own levels! They can use all of the level editing possibilities you used while developing the game and so have a powerful tool in their hands. You will be amazed how creative the gamers who love your game are, and the best thing is you get new content from your community without any effort! Thus your game stays longer on top of the charts as there is always something new to explore for your players.

As gamers love to brag about the new cool levels they made, they are going to tell their friends to play the level and help you with promoting your game, without spending huge budgets on marketing! Instead you get really passionate players and content for free to stay interesting.

Customize to your game

To make the best use of the level editor, you can customize its look so it matches the style of your game. See the following images of Squaby for example, which uses a custom GUI for dragging the entities into the scene and a custom LevelSelectionList.

Custom LevelEditor UI in Squaby

Custom LevelSelectionList

Ready for take-off

To summarize, these are the benefits of the V-Play level editor:

• Cut development time as level creation, balancing and testing works while the game is running.
• Let your players create their own levels and build a community around your game – user-generated content for free.
• Customize the look of the level editor to perfectly match your game style, or use the default V-Play skin for quick results.

You can start using the level editor today with daily build version 1.3.3 and use this advantage over other games. Daily builds are only available for customers on the Pro Plan – however, we really are in a giveaway mood after finishing the hard work on the level editor. So if you decide to upgrade to Pro, send us an email to specials@v-play.net to get a promo code for a 20% discount. But hurry up, as this offer is only available this week until the 12^th of May and limited to the first 100 promo code requests.

Extended Sprite Sheet Support

Setting up animations for multiple resolutions was a bit tedious before with the SpriteSequence component, because it did not have built-in support for multiple resolutions and you had to export a separate image for each sprite animation containing all frames in a contiguous row.

This gets a lot easier now with the SpriteSequenceFromFile component. It supports to define animated sprites from a sprite sheet exported with tools like Texture Packer or Zwoptex. In addition, it also supports trimmed and rotated images.This saves a lot of precious graphics memory and allows you to pack more sprites into a sprite sheet. Beginning with version 1.3.2 these features are also included in SingleSpriteFromFile, which is great for easy accessing of a single frame within a sprite sheet.

The following image demonstrates how dense you can now pack your sprites in a sprite sheet with the trimming support, captured with Texture Packer:

Clipping Support

If you need to clip the contents of a Flickable, images or any other items you can do so now with the new Clipping item. This allows scrollable lists that do not cover the whole screen if they get larger, a feature which was often requested by our community. Thus we are glad to support this feature now.

TextInputVPlay Item

The new TextInputVPlay  item allows you to use a text input field without opening a native input dialog. This helps to keep the style of your game and customize the text input with custom fonts and colors.

Along with these changes we also fixed some bugs reported by our customers. So do not hesitate and download daily builds if you are a Pro Subscriber already. If you’re a Free Subscriber, you still have time until the 14^th of April to upgrade your subscription while saving 50% off the regular price and get Daily Builds access today. After the 14^th, the Pro Plan will switch to the regular price of $599 instead of $299 as part of the Early Bird special offer.

So what are daily builds and why exactly should you care about? Although we have a complete and accurate testing procedure for V-Play releases, every now and then it’s the case that users find bugs or suggest minor improvements that we want to share early in our development process. Here daily builds come into play: Daily builds contain the latest patches, bug fixes and new functionality, ready-to-use even before a regular release. That means, you are able to use completely new components and features we add to V-Play as soon as we push them to our servers.

Even if these builds are not always entirely stable (both in terms of API and during execution), our valued Pro Users do not need to wait for the next regular V-Play update, but can develop with the latest version and then instantly distribute their games using the daily build libraries.

New project format for daily builds

As you might also prefer to publish your final game not with a daily build but with the latest stable version of V-Play, we made it really easy to switch between these two on a per-project base. Beginning with V-Play version 1.3 we ship new project template wizards with simplified project structures. In comparison to earlier releases you now only need one configuration line in your project file:

CONFIG += v-play

This modification has the following advantages:

• V-Play related project configurations are always in sync with the currently installed V-Play SDK version
• Your project tree structure is cleaned up
•  There are no duplicated files in your source code repositories (like before with the QMLApplicationViewer class files)
• And finally the configuration statement makes it really easy to switch between daily and stable V-Play libraries.

If you want to switch between stable and daily builds you simply replace the line

CONFIG += v-play

with

CONFIG += v-play_daily

and run a clean build. Simple as that!

By the way, we also recommend updating the project files for existing projects built against version 1.3.0 and above by either removing all content of your existing project file so that the content corresponds to the following:

# V-Play project
CONFIG += v-play

# V-Play Demo Game
customFolder.source = qml
DEPLOYMENTFOLDERS += customFolder

# Add sources
SOURCES += main.cpp

or by creating a new empty project with our project wizard (using the same name and identifier as your existing game) and replace the existing project file in your project’s root directory with the new one. If there arise any problems we are happy to help in our support forums.

Getting Daily Builds

So there is only one question left: How are you getting the latest V-Play builds?

First of all we need to welcome you as a Pro Subscriber, so if you haven’t upgraded yet, there is no more time to waste. We are currently in Early Bird until April 14th, which saves you 50% of the regular price. So instead of $599 it is only $299 for one more week! You can upgrade by heading over to your subscription overview: https://v-play.net/developers/subscription/.

Finally as a Pro Subscriber you can then simply start the SDKMaintenanceTool in your V-Play installation directory, choose the “Package manager” option and select the newly available “Daily Builds” packages, starting today with version 1.3.1. We are shipping the daily build documentation too, you can either install the “Documentation” package for Qt Creator integration or browse it online at http://v-play.net/doc/daily/.

We wish you a lot of fun exploring the latest V-Play features, even before the official announcements.

New Design

Heart of the new website is the completely reworked and unique design by the very talented artist Tobias Klika. From now on our website does not only look fresh on desktop browsers but also on mobile phones and tablets, thanks to the full responsive layout (grab your mobile if you don’t believe it).

Besides the new design we brought the relevant bits of information into the foreground and added a bunch of new content what’s V-Play all about. We summarized the key benefits for different target groups and added a section with all the hard facts and our main features.

Our new homepage already covers the most important facts about V-Play, including some of the current showcase games built with V-Play Game Engine. Nevertheless we are rolling out an own showcase section in the next couple of weeks, so if you’ve already developed a cool game with V-Play send us a short message and we’ll be more than happy to add your game to the list of showcases too.

Developers Area

We also made some changes to our Developers Area (formerly known as Beta Area). First of all we made almost all sections publicly available. This allows you to look up the most recent forum posts without logging in, even if we encourage you to do so, as we are still providing additional information after logging in.

We also made the download of V-Play and our plans overview more prominent, giving it a dedicated page in our main navigation. If you haven’t already downloaded V-Play should do so now!

New profile page

Your new profile page gives you the possibility to share some information about you with your fellow developers in the V-Play community. You can reach your profile information via the link in the Developers Area’s sidebar. In case you’ve forgotten your V-Play login credentials you can reset your password on the homepage of the Developers Area easily.

Build Server

The new website was a good occasion for giving our Build Server interface some love too. We incorporated the new design and slightly changed the layout. For example, thanks to tabs on the build pages it’s now easier to scan the right QR code for either your Android or iOS device.

Rewards

One of our favorite features of the new website is the introduction of a reward system for our most active customers. As we really love to see our developers participating in V-Play, you can earn a fixed number of points for certain activities, allowing you to level up in ranks. Unlike on other platforms these ranks are not only for showing off by your friends, but reward you with real-life goodies and advantages. After earning points for installing or updating your V-Play SDK you may get some more free builds, merchandising goodies or even discounts on your next V-Play subscription period. For a full list of points and ranks have a look at our new ranks page.

And best of all, we already summed up your previous activity on v-play.net, just head over to your profile page and check which level are you currently on.

So what do you think about our new website? Let us know what you like or dislike and earn points by commenting below this post while being logged in.

So let’s dive into the benefits in more detail without further ado:

Cocos2d Comparison from Ray Wenderlich Tutorial

We love Cocos2d. In fact, our development team has used Cocos2d-iphone since November 2009, and we now embrace Cocos2d-x as our underlying rendering technology to get the maximum performance across all platforms. However, working with C++ for game logic requires a multitude of development time and source code compared with scripting languages. To prove how big the difference is, we implemented the popular Cocos2d ninja game from Ray Wenderlich’s excellent website with V-Play. Ray’s tutorial can be found here: How To Make A Simple iPhone Game with Cocos2d. For the very same game, you can save more than 60% of source code with V-Play and its programming languages QML and JavaScript compared with the C++ or Objective-C version! The whole game implemented in QML takes only 150 lines of code, compared with 369 in C++, so you can imagine how big the difference may get for larger projects. The game is still running at solid 60 fps on mobile devices because only the game logic is written in JavaScript, whereas the V-Play components are still written in C++.

You can find the source code of the game and also the C++ version as a comparison here.

Particle Editor Improvements

As we announced in the last post, we improved the Particle Editor to make it even easier to work with: You can now create own particle effects and export them as JSON files to use them within your own games. As it is cross-platform, designing and tweaking effects is not only possible on your desktop, but also on your mobile while you are on the go. We were using the editor to create 20 pre-built effects which can serve as a starting point. With more than 50 particle textures available, the possibilities to create new stunning effects are endless. We are looking forward to seeing many cool particle effects in your V-Play games! The source code of the editor is publicly available here.

Community Feedback Integrations

We listen to our developer community carefully and highly value feedback, bug reports and feature requests. Usually we are able to provide a bug fix within a couple of hours, and we give our best to answer any support questions in the forums within hours! You can see which fixes were added in this release in the changelog. To improve our customer support even further, we will soon add the option of daily build access for our Pro users. This has the huge advantage that you immediately get access to our additions from your requests, but also to test-drive brand-new features we are currently working on. So there’s no need to wait for an upcoming official update release – instead you can use it right away.

First Upgrade for Free Users

This is the third update and thus our customers on the Free Plan are able to update to version 1.1. Follow our update guide to see how you can get it. If you want to have access to the latest version and daily builds, extended support and publishing for Android & iOS, upgrade to the Pro Plan and save 50% with our Early Bird license. The early bird discount is only available until the 31^st of March, so hurry up!

We hope you have as much fun with the update as we already had developing it.

(The screenshots were put into the device images with Breezi PlaceIt)

They developed this game within one month without any previous knowledge about V-Play and besides other workload at uni. The post below describes how they achieved that accomplishment. You can download the game for free on the Android Market, and soon on iOS.

Finding an innovative game concept

We are two students in the bachelor’s degree programme Mobile Computing of the University of Applied Sciences Hagenberg. In the third semester we had a C++/Qt-Course, with the task to develop a mobile application. The choice of technology and platform was left by us. Christian Feldbacher (Co-Founder of V-Play) did an invited lecture and presented us the game engine. We were impressed by it, because you could deploy an application on various different mobile platforms with little effort, and we immediately wanted to make a game with the engine.

After some serious brainstorming, we decided to make a puzzle game, because you can implement the basic game idea very quickly and it is easy to extend it with more content. Furthermore puzzle games are often top-rated, when they are easy to learn and hard to master. We looked at the top puzzle games in the Play Store like Elements and Flow and it became quickly evident, that we cannot copy these game ideas one by one. Because behind these games there are often big game studios which can provide the game with much more content and do more marketing.

So we tried to use the mechanics of the top games and turned it into something new. We thought about the game Elements in the Play Store, where you have to move blocks with swipe-gestures to their counterpiece. The game element of moving blocks was very interesting and we wanted to use it in our game too. We also had the old Pokemon games in mind where you often needed to move blocks to solve various puzzles. So our idea was born: You have to move blocks like in Elements, but instead of moving them to their counterpieces, you need to move them to build a way for your hero. As the basic concept was there, we were bubbling over ideas for gameplay elements. We wanted switches, blocks you can move but not walk over them, holes and many more.

From idea to realization

So the idea was there and our motivation was high, because we believed in our idea and we wanted to succeed with our game.  So we started coding during boring lectures and through the night. And within short time we had the first prototype.

Everything looked awful and we needed a better design. But how should we design nice graphics with absolutely no design skills? Luckily we found a great site for free sprites: lostgarden.com. The cool thing on this site is that you can use all sprites without any restrictions. You can use them even in commercial games. The PlanetCute design suited our needs perfectly. Blocks, stones, gems, a protagonist: Everything was there. After some editing, which would be easy for a designer but was hard for us, we had a nice spritesheet we could use in our game. With this sprites we could make the game pseudo-3D / 2.5D. After some code changes, we were pretty satisfied with the results:

But not everything worked as planned. Changing the z-order of QML items during runtime was not supported by the V-Play game engine. Blocks disappeared and graphical bugs were the consequence. But the support of V-Play is awesome! After explaining our problems, they made two hotfixes which solved them. And we needn’t to wait weeks or months. No, we got the hotfix within one day! But not only this, also questions about the build server, performance and so on were answered within hours. We are really thankful, without this support we could never finish the game.

Content, Content, Content

The game mechanics worked and it contained various different gameplay elements. But without content nobody would download the game. At first we thought we make a level generator. But while this is reasonable in games like Flow, it does not work quite well with our game because we have too many different block types, which makes it impossible to create algorithms that work.

Coding levels is very exhausting and really annoying, so we developed our own, customized level editor. Thanks to QML and the property system and already existing V-Play components this is no rocket science either:

When we started creating the levels, we didn’t envision how many different possibilities there are to create a level. For example, at first we thought the player is just walking on blocks. But after the first few levels we thought allowing the player to move on the ground would make the game more interesting. We also gave the first versions to our friends. And one guy -Eibi- was very fond of the game and he did not only beat our records, he also created some of the coolest levels in the game.

We had many different game play elements and we thought about a tutorial which explained every element in detail. But we decided against that. Instead we made a quite easy level for every block type as a kind of introduction level, to give the player a chance to find out how the different blocks behave. This is much more satisfying for the player and less annoying compared to a 10-page tutorial text.

As the update 1.2 of the V-Play game engine was released, which significantly improved the performance of our game, we published it on the Google Play Store. And the feedback was throughout positive with an average rating of 4.9. Our next goal is to get an iOS-developer-account and publish it on the iOS-Market as the game runs on iOS without any modifications as well. Additionally, we are working on a new update with new levels and more game play elements. The next big thing are portals

Thanks a lot to Christian & Andreas for taking their time writing this inspring guide, it was a pleasure to support you guys and see the game grow and evolve so quickly! The whole V-Play team wishes you all the best with your game!

If you are wondering what a game jam is: It is an event, at which people passionate about video games come together and create games matching a given theme in a very limited amount of time. It is not just programmers who can join, but everybody who is interested in games. Therefore the ideal team consists of people with different skills like game design, game art, audio and programming. This was our team this year:

From left to right: Chris, Nico, David, Markus & Alex

The global game jam organizers provide a theme for finding a game idea. This year, the theme was the sound of a heartbeat. It got revealed at 6 p.m. on Friday, with the submission deadline on Sunday 3 p.m. already close. The theme also reminded us of a passing train, so that was when Locomotive Breath was born:

In Locomotive Breath you are playing a train driver in the Far North, whose adrenaline level is at a constant high because he needs to keep his beloved train on track. That is not easy because moose are standing on the tracks, as they prefer walking in areas without snow as well (actually, this is a real issue there). So your role is to drive the locomotive by regulating the velocity and switching the rails to avoid elk collisions. As we love playing together, we added a second part to the game: Your friend plays the “coal shoveler” to support the driver. The more coals you shovel in (by swiping them in the coal wagon), the higher the steam pressure gets and the faster your buddy can drive. If you shovel too much, you can lower the pressure by pulling the steam pipe. The steam sound also displaces the moose, so you can help the driver in multiple ways.

After defining the game idea, we got our hands dirty and started to create images, audio files and programmed the game logic. With a team of 5, everybody worked on his favorite area and we had a playable version up and running by Saturday afternoon. Starting from then, we balanced the game to be challenging and fun, fixed bugs and added special effects to improve the visual appearance of the game. The V-Play Particle Editor introduced with the last update was a great tool for this job: With it we designed & tweaked the effects like a smother when the steam pipe is pulled, changing smoke color and size based on the pressure level, or snowflakes passing faster the faster the train goes. We also added a single-player mode where the steam pressure regulates automatically, but most fun is to play it with a buddy on a tablet. By the end, we managed to build a game we really enjoyed playing – so we published it to the Google Play Store where it was available from Sunday afternoon! Here is the prove we had fun:

And here is a video of our game:

Overall, the game jam was a great experience. Because of the limited time, you really need to focus on the relevant parts of your game and keep it small. This jam showed, our slogan

“It takes 3 days to…

•  Go to a festival
•  Grow a beard
•  Make a Game with V-Play”

might even be true for 2 days

I strongly recommend everybody interested in games, no matter which kind of expertise, to join a Game Jam at least once. I promise you won’t be able to stop joining them afterwards, as they are so much fun, challenging and a great source for learning. This year, more than 16.500 people registered globally and created more than 2900 games – like I’ve told you in the beginning of the post: absolutely awesome!

The Particle Editor allows to create and modify particle effects. Your particle property changes are applied immediately, which makes it very easy to test different settings and to get the perfect look for your game effects. If you are not satisfied with the results, just double-click on the sliders and the changed value will be reset to its default setting.

The great thing is, that it is not only available on all supported desktop platforms Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, but also on all mobile platforms including iOS, Android, Symbian and MeeGo! This is perfect for testing the particle performance directly on your target devices and allows you to see the performance impact of property changes while the app is running.

The editor source code is available as part of the V-Play download in the folder <V-Play SDK Installation Directory>/Demos/V-PlaySDK/ParticleEditor/  You can copy the example and add your own particle effects for creation of totally new effects, or for testing the performance impact of particle properties. As particles are quite performance-intensive on mobile devices, we added a dedicated performance section to the Particle documentation.

If you want to use your particle effects with the Particle Editor, you should use the new Particle component instead of the old Particles component, which is now deprecated. The API got a bit simplified, which led us to the decision to add a new component. The old Particles component is still working fine, so if you do not want to use the new functionality you do not need to adapt it to the new one. You can find an overview which properties got changed here.

The V-Play Particle Editor is a project we are continuing to work on, and which we will publish in the App Stores. The final version will include the option to import particle effects more easily and to export them to plist format so the effects are also usable with other engines like cocos2d. Additionally we will add the feature to share your particle creations with other users within the app. What else would you expect of a great particle editor? Let us know in the comments section below, or in our support forums.

We added a Video item capable of playing video files on iOS and Android. It uses the native Video player facilities under the hood and thus allows showing native control overlays or using the video full screen. You can easily embed it like all other QML items in your scene, and modify its size or position as you like. You can also add your own control elements and control the video functionality directly from QML and JavaScript, while enjoying maximum native performance.

Another item we added is the MultiTouchArea. It has almost the same API as the MouseArea and PinchArea, which makes it very intuitive to work with and easy to change existing code from a single-touch to a multi-touch environment. You can also use the MultiTouchArea for detecting a pinch gesture and to rotate items with a two-finger-rotation. Consider this example, where you can drag an image:

Image {
 source: "star.png"
 MouseArea {
   anchors.fill: parent
   drag.target: parent
 }
}

This can now easily be turned into multiple images being draggable with this code:

Image {
 source: "star.png"
 MultiTouchArea {
   anchors.fill: parent
   multitouch.target: parent
 }
}

Image {
  source: "moon.png"
  MultiTouchArea {
    anchors.fill: parent
    multitouch.target: parent
  }
}

Furthermore, we added a guide how to publish your V-Play game to the iOS App Store and Google Play Store. It covers all the information needed to make your game available to the shiny smartphone market. You can also read the last two blog posts about Play Store and App Store publishing for more information about this topic.

We are very proud of another app we added to this update: the V-Play Particle Editor lets you change the particle properties while the app is running. The cool thing is that this also works on mobile so you can test the performance of your particle effects directly on your device and tweak them easily. There will be another blog post covering the Particle Editor in more detail very soon, so stay tuned for more.

As always, you can have a look at the changelog for a full list of changes of this update.

The update is available immediately for all Pro Users through the V-Play SDKMaintenanceTool. Users on our Free Plan will get it with a couple of weeks delay. Happy coding