Soundtastic for iPad Released

Being able to change the pitch of a sound from that of a monster all the way up to the sound of a chipmunk makes Soundtastic the coolest new sound app for the iPad. Not only can you record you own sounds, but you have a built in selection of pre-recorded sounds to get you started quickly, You can tap all across the screen to change the pitch of one sound over and over again or tap on multiple sounds in sequence to make your own symphony of unique sounds. Use Soundtastic to keep your toddlers amused while waitng for your food to arrive. Or make lots of space for yourself on the subway. With practice you can probably ensure your mother-in-law stays at her house instead of yours for the rest of the month.

Angry Guy 2.1 for iPad Released

Angry Guy is a simple shoot-em up video game with a twist. The twist is that you can make the enemy game piece out of any photo you want to do so with. Just snap a quick picture using your camera, or choose a picture out of your photo library, and Angry Guy let's you easily mask out the background so it can quickly become the target of the game. The good news is that you play the role of a heavily armored tank that can blast the enemies out of the sky as they swoop by across the sky. The bad news is that your enemy can also drop missiles on you, and while you are in a tank, a tank doesn't move very quickly, so you'll have to plan your shots and avoid incoming fire as well. You get 250 points every time you hit an enemy, but you lose 100 points if you get hit and you also lose 50 points every time one of your shots misses.

PhotoToy 2.0 for iPad Released

PhotoToy lets you play with your photos by applying them like stickers on top of a variety of 3D Shapes. You can tack your photos on top of cubes, pyramids, spheres and stars. You can then adjust their speed of rotation, size, and movement. You can add multiple shapes at once, and stack them on top of each other, or have them bounce around on the screen each having their own separate paths. You can shake your iphone to shuffle them around, click on one to edit it's settings, or drag it around into a new position. You can also take a snapshot of your creation and save it to your photo library, and PhotoToy is smart enough to remember your creation so you can continue working on it the next time you open it up.

2D Terrain Mapper for use with iPhone SDK, Coco2D, Chipmunk and SpaceManger

There are a number of fantastic libraries available for writing games on the iPhone. Cocos2D is an amazing 2D graphics engine. Chipmunk is an equally awesome physics library. And SpaceManager allows you to integrate chipmunk with Cocos2D without leaving the comfort of Objective C. The problem I had was synching the graphic images I was using in Cocos2D with the shapes I defined in Chipmunk. I could assign simple shapes to simple graphic objects easily enough, but when it came to a dynamically changing moving terrain, that was another story. So after hunting around for a solution, I found some code for a color picker for the iPhone by the helpful folks over at markj.net. After hunting around the web some more, I was able to find a few other missing pieces that allowed me to cobble together the code I needed. I've gathered a demo file together and attached it to this post. It's not as clean as I would like it to be, and surely some of it could be written better, but hopefully it will be helpful to some of you out there. Basically, with this demo project, you can see how you can take a PNG of a ground terrain set against a transparent background and this project will follow that terrain by starting at the top of each column in the image and working it's way down until it hits the first non-transparent pixel in each column. It then uses that data to produce segments for chipmunk, which allow your game pieces to follow the terrain accurately.


The file is located here. It's a zip file of an Xcode project.


Enjoy