Professionalize your game by adding sounds and text for menus and labels throughout your game.

SOUND

To play sounds you need the Sound Engine, which you import into your layer like so:

#import “SimpleAudioEngine.h”

Then you can just code a method to handle some background music playing:

-(void)loadAudio {

// Loading Sounds Synchronously

[CDSoundEngine setMixerSampleRate:CD_SAMPLE_RATE_MID];

[[CDAudioManager sharedManager] setResignBehavior:kAMRBStopPlay

autoHandle:YES];

soundEngine = [SimpleAudioEngine sharedEngine];

[soundEngine preloadBackgroundMusic:BACKGROUND_MUSIC];

[soundEngine playBackgroundMusic:BACKGROUND_MUSIC];

}

You can see immediately that you can preload the audio in one place and then play it in another. This is great for game performance. This means you can preload audio in the main menu, for example, and then play it when you actually need it.

Another way to put this into perspective is to preload an audio when an object such as an enemy ship or main player is created and then play the specific sound when his state is changed. For example, if you create a main player class which manage the player’s state between walking, jumping, running, flying…you can make the calls to play different sound effects when the player’s state changes.

For example;

-(void)changeState:(CharacterStates)newState {

// stop all, nil action, nil move, newPosition ivar, set new state passed into it…

[self stopAllActions];

id action = nil;

[self setCharacterState:newState];

switch (newState) {

case kStateFlying:

action = [CCAnimate actionWithAnimation:flyingAnim];

break;

default:

break;

} // ends the switch that checks for state

if (action != nil) {

[self runAction:[CCRepeatForever actionWithAction:action]];

}

}

You can also get more sophisticated and preload audio into your layer using plists for lists of files which are loaded as soon as the scene is loaded. We will look at this in the Advanced flavor of this post!

TEXT

Now let’s move on to some text. One of my favorite places to add text is at the beginning of a layer when the game is about to start. For this we create a label like so:

CGSize winSize = [CCDirector sharedDirector].winSize;

label = [CCLabelTTF labelWithString:@”hello!” dimensions:CGSizeMake(300, 250) hAlignment:UITextAlignmentCenter fontName:@”Stencil” fontSize:40];

label.color = ccc3(000,000,000);

label.position = ccp(winSize.width/2, winSize.height/2);

This creates a simple label which you can place anywhere on the screen, change its color etc. Let’s say you also wanted to animate this label, you could string this along at the bottom:

CCScaleTo *scaleUp = [CCScaleTo actionWithDuration:2.5 scale:1.8];

CCScaleTo *scaleBack = [CCScaleTo actionWithDuration:0.5 scale:1.5];

CCDelayTime *delay = [CCDelayTime actionWithDuration:3.0];

CCFadeOut *fade = [CCFadeOut actionWithDuration:1.5];

CCHide *hide = [CCHide action];

CCSequence *sequence = [CCSequence actions:scaleUp, scaleBack, delay, fade, hide, nil];

[label runAction:sequence];

Cool! Now you’ve got the workings of some awesome eye candy for your games.