“Kwik literally saved months off development time, which means we can submit many more apps per calendar year.”
Tanya Puntti
Dress Up Funhouse
Multi cultural dress up game for children.
Hundreds of outfits, funny animal costumes, princess, ballerina and fairy accessories, as well as 2 additional games including 5 pet dress up games and 2 cake dress ups, means hours of fun for your child.
Meet our 10 adorable characters from all corners of the world – Kira, Chiyo, Peter, Minna, Abena, Luli, Hanna, Annabella, Georgie and Prema.
WHAT’S INSIDE:
✓ Hundreds of clothing items including dresses, jeans, shirts, socks, shoes and more!
✓ Dozens of accessories including bracelets, earings, bangles, hand bags, hats and glasses.
✓ Crazy fun dress up items including moustaches, pirate outfits, animal head bands and funny glasses.
✓ Several animal costumes including dogs, cats, panda bears, cow and a deer.
✓ A girls game wouldn’t be complete without fairy wings, princess dress ups and ballerina costumes.
✓ Interactive toys to play with in each room including building blocks, squeaky toys, balls to toss and many more!
2 BONUS GAMES:
✓ Funny pet dress up games that will keep your girls laughing. 5 animals in total.
✓ Cake dress ups
APP FEATURES:
✓ Kid friendly interface
✓ No third-party advertising!
✓ Universal App: pay once, run on ALL your iOS devices
How did Kwik help?
Kwiksher allowed me as an indie developer to build our own apps using Photoshop and Corona SDK, making development easier, quicker, and more fun. It literally saved months off development time, which means we can submit many more apps per calendar year.
Let me explain this more. In past years I had created a few popular apps using Apple’s Xcode and their built in Interface Builder. Each took several months of development and were much simpler than Dress Up Funhouse. I had previously considered creating Dress Up Funhouse the same way, however I was also wanting the app to run on every iOS device as well as Android without having to code twice! This is when I first discovered Corona SDK. Corona’s system of “code once, deploy everywhere” really interested me. Furthermore, Corona allows developers to create apps 10x faster using Lua code. Great I thought! Having a background in C++ I picked up Lua code easily. However, for a high graphic game such as Dress Up Funhouse, I knew it would still take several months coding in Lua to set the coordinates for each graphic. Not to mention changing positions, keeping track of transformations or rotating objects. To change the position of a graphic, you need to manipulate the ( xOrigin, yOrigin ) or the ( x, y ) properties within Lua Code. This was something I wasn’t looking forward to as it caused me much grief in the past. This is where I thought there had to be an easier way!
While looking through Corona Resources section I came across a link for Kwik. It didn’t take long for me to realise the advantage of setting out my game screens with Photoshop PSD files and allowing Kwiksher plugin to export the project layers and pages. YAY no more time needed to position and set coordinates for every image or movement. Not only does Kwiksher export the Lua code for you, it also resizes each graphic for multiple device resolutions. Double score! If it wasn’t for Kwiksher I’d have to create numerous image sizes for each mobile device separately. Another time saver! A game I had initially thought would take me 12 months to create as an Indi developer ended up taking only 3 months! This also included a learning curve on how to use Kwiksher. Our second app for kids ‘Stamp And Sketch’ has double the images and took only 6 weeks to develop!
What are your favorite features?
My favourite feature in Kwik is definitely the ability to create each game screen using Photoshop layers and having Kwik easily export the code without the need for setting coordinates myself. I love the fact that designers and illustrators with no coding experience could easily create a magazine or children’s book app using nothing but Photoshop and Kwik for the illustrations and navigation, then have Corona export it for multiple platforms. At the same time, if you’re already a Corona developer with knowledge in Lua Code, Kwik also allows you to extend your project with external Code. You can import external libraries or simply enter snippets of Lua code whenever you need them. It’s the best of both worlds and the possibilities limitless.
For Dress Up Funhouse I also made good use of buttons and scroll objects. Along the bottom of the game you’ll see items of clothing. Each clickable item of clothing is a simple kwik button that tells the device to do something when the user clicks it. The items are also scrollable. This was done using Scroll Objects feature that was added in a recent Kwik 2.1 version.
I also love the image optimisation option that was introduced in the latest version. It cuts the final app size down by at least 60% and the graphics still look great!
Any tips and tricks to share?
– Plan out your project first and create the first page along with all navigation before going onward! I learned this the hard way and by the time I got to the 30th screenshot of my game, if I wanted to change the navigation or a shared image, then I had to edit and re-save every page.
– Save your project often and backup after every important step is completed. You don’t want to redo work because you’ve accidentally deleted it or pressed the wrong button.
– Animation will improve your apps ten fold! Learn as much as you can about animation and how things move. No one wants to play with a static app. Create eyes that blink, objects that move and spin when the user presses it. Often the animation is a lot simpler than it first seems. For example the blinking eyes of the characters seen in ‘Dress Up Funhouse’. First I separated the eyes from the body so I had two graphics. I layered the eyes over the body in Photoshop then used Kwik linear animation feature to scale the height down to 2% starting with a wait request. Then I set another Kwik feature called a ‘Timer Button’ to make the eye animation play a number of times when an action is called.
Learn about sprites and how to create animations with sprite sheets. Take the time to read through this page http://www.kwiksher.com/tutorials-kwik/tutorial-sprites/
– As you create apps, open up a Kwik file called .kwk and understand a little of how it works. As you become an advanced user, its often quicker to edit that file directly than to open kwik menus that take time to load. Especially if its something you want to change on every screenshot. Furthermore, sooner or later you may come across a problem and your project won’t open in Photoshop. More often than not the solution is in editing that one file, so it’s important to know how to read it.
– If you have any trouble, participate in community forums. I found help was never any more than 24 hours away!
