I have just released a new version of Niño, a (completely free) puzzle game for iOS. I developed Niño with two friends in our free time in the last three months of 2013. Niño is a turn-based strategy game which can be pretty challenging:

The rules are simple, the solutions not.

iOS Simulator Screen shot 13 May 2014 14.20.10

You are Niño, the white cloud. You have to move through the board and reach the exit on the other side of the screen without being captured by the red clouds.

The game is turn-based, so you make a move, then the red clouds make a move. Your move consists of two steps in any direction, including diagonally and a mix of different directions. The red clouds move by only one step, so they are slower than you, but there are a lot of them.

There is a total of 200 puzzles split into 5 episodes. The first levels are very simple, but they will become progressively harder when you progress to later episodes. And you can always challenge yourself by trying to match the minimal number of moves indicated by the game to solve a puzzle.

Please download Niño from the App Store and let me know what you think of it.

How to build a game?

I developed Niño with two friends in three months. Peter Kortenhoeven is responsible for all the graphics, Lennard Meijer designed the game mechanics and created all puzzles. I did all the coding and made the game actually work.

We challenged ourselves to finish an actual working game within a few month’s time. Therefore we wanted to keep the game small and simple and only focus on the elements which were absolutely necessary for the gameplay. Besides that, this is the first game I have ever created, so keep things simple and not being over-ambitious seems a good idea anyway ;).

I have used the open-source (cross-platform) framework Cocos2d-x (version 3.0) for developing Niño. This was the first time that I worked with Cosos2d-x and I liked it very much. The API of Cocos2d-x is simple and nice to work with, and the performance of the framework seems good. I also liked the fact that I could write the game in c++11, and try out some of the (relatively) new features added to c++.

I really liked the process of creating a game and I’m determined to write some new games in the future. Maybe I will participate in some online challenges to create a new game every month, or even create a game a week.

Reviews

There are some nice reviews of Niño on the internet:

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Niño, a puzzle game for iOS