We're Bayside Games, a new mobile development company from beautiful Brisbane, Australia. We're creating a new iOS game called Robots Can't Jump, and we're recording a lot of the process of its creation!
In this video tutorial we discover that particles are hard to get right on iOS (and Android!), particularly if you're not using a framework that already has them built in. We create an example particle manager from scratch for our game Robots Can't Jump.
We use C++ and the Marmalade SDK (
Marmalade - Cross Platform Mobile Application Development), although the technique used is so close to base OpenGL ES code that you could easily port it across to anything that lets you directly use GLES functions from your code.
This tutorial was recorded by a game industry veteran with 10+ years experience and goes into great depth by showing you "big studio" development methodologies. There is also a lot of detail about how the system can be made to scale up to draw potentially thousands of particles at very high frame-rates by harnessing the power of the GPUs found in modern smart-phones.
Last but not least we also detail a very handy data-driven technique that allows programmers and content creators (e.g. artists, designers) to work separately on particle systems and bind them together at run-time, without using XML or any separate loading code.
Enjoy! Also be sure to check out the rest of the video tutorials on our DevBlog if you're interested in this type of stuff.
Creating A FAST Particle FX Manager From Scratch Bayside Games – Dev Blog
Video Tutorial - Creating an OpenGL ES Particle FX Manager for iOS
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