Animation Workflow with Corona, TexturePacker & Photoshop
I have made the jump from Flash to iOS development and the combination of the Corona SDK and TexturePacker has been super fast and efficient. I have set up a really fast workflow for creating my animations so I thought I would share.
Photoshop Animation Panel
The Photoshop animation panel is amazing. I animate faster in Photoshop now than I ever did in Flash. Here is how to set things up.
- Set your animation frames to 0.1 seconds
- Rough out your animations
- Export as Video at 10 fps (0.1 = 10fps) into its own folder
TexturePacker
Set up TexturePacker like you normally would. Bring in your roughs and make them into a sheet. Go ahead and insert your rough animations into your game. How does it look?
Keep working in roughs until you get the animation how you want it to look. When you want to update your animation you just:
- Export video again, replace existing files
- Click Publish in TexturePacker
Your sprites are updated in 2 clicks! It's so fast you can edit and check your animations in game almost instantly.
This has been a really big help for me. I hope it helps you develop even faster in Corona SDK.
The best code editor on Mac – Textmate
My transition to a Mac developer was a bit tough. My biggest lament was giving up FlashDevlop on Windows, my favorite code editor for Actionscript and its counterpart for Unity, UnityDevelop.
This didn't affect me too much until I started my iOS game in Corona SDK, using Lua, and was coding daily. I was using Xcode somewhat happily until an Xcode update disable support for Lua (Thanks Apple!) which left me code editor-less.
I tried about every editor and Lua package I can find and settled on Textmate. While many of the options in Textmate can be a bit difficult to find, it does everything I want it to: projects, smart code completion, that takes into account my defined variables, TODO lists, code snippets, method browser and bookmarks.
I have even jumped on a couple other recommended editors during my development and none of them stand up to Textmate.
So if you are an Actionscript developer making the jump to Corona SDK, buy Textmate, read a few of the docs and I think you will be happy.