bits.toPixels()

As a game developer you often want to show off parts of your work, for example on Twitter or Facebook. Sometimes plain images are enough, but other times you might have a cool game sequence that requires animation to come alive and get the proper attention. You could record video clips and share them with your followers on YouTube etcetera, but most of the times you're probably better off by just creating an animated GIF instead. Creating animated GIFs is of course nothing new, and not only useful to game devs. From my experience it's an excellent way to quickly demonstrate new features and ideas no matter what you're developing, without the need to have a working prototype. It took me a while to find my favorite tools that allow me to create GIFs of decent quality quickly and without hassle. Which tool to use depends on what you need to do. Basically, there are two different scenarios where animated GIFs come in handy. 1. Record an actual video sequence (e.g. gamepla...

Not very long ago you had to upload your App Store screenshots in many different resolutions for all the different iOS devices. A real pain. Fortunately, Apple realized this and simplified the screenshot upload process a lot. Now you only need to upload screenshots for the 5.5" iPhone and 12.9" iPad displays, and automatic scaling will be done for remaining devices with lower resolutions. It's recommended to grab your screenshots from a physical device, but what do you do if you don't have a 5.5" iPhone? Well, instead of buying a new device or scaling lower resolution graphics you can use the Corona Simulator to get the high resolution screenshots you're looking for. This is how I do it for my Corona SDK apps on my Windows machine, and my example assumes that your screenshots are taken in portrait mode and that your app is primarily designed for iPhone rather than iPad. You must of course also have a monitor that can handle the resolution of the screensho...

Generating an app's icon in all necessary sizes for both Android and iOS can be really time consuming and boring. It would be ok to do this work manually if you'd only have to do it once for each app just before release. Unfortunately that's not the case since the final app icon is most likely something that evolves through iteration. Needless to say, there is time to save by finding an efficient way to automate the icon generation. There are many tools out there that can help out with this. I've tried a couple of them and they've all worked just fine. The problem is that I've found that they don't actually save me that much time in the end. For iOS, you need a completely square icon and iTunes/iOS will handle the rounding of the corners for you. For Android on the other hand, you have complete freedom when designing the shape of your icon. I prefer to have my Android icon look as similar to the iOS icon as possible, which means that I'll have to cre...

When working with sprites in Corona SDK I've quite often run into a problem with sprite sheet frames occasionally overlapping each other. When I say occasionally I mean that it doesn't happen for every new sprite I create even though the same sprite sheet is used, and it doesn't happen on all device resolutions. This is what it might look like when the overlap happens. Not pretty... The sprite's image sheet Sprites in action, pixel overlapping between frames To work around this problem in the past, I've just padded my sprite images with a couple of transparent pixels so that the possible overlap won't be visible even though it might still be there. This has caused some additional work both to set up the sprite sheet images, as well as calculating the frames' positions within the sheet. So I figured I was gonna look for another solution to be able to create sprite sheets without padding that still look good. Tough luck it turned out. The pixel o...