My Tech Setup For Making Games With Cocos Creator

Here’s an overview of my tech and toolkit “stack” for making games with Cocos Creator.

I use Typescript and IntelliJ IDEA as IDE, with tslint for static analysis.

I use JetBrains IDE Support to debug Typescript by connecting Chrome to IDEA. For this reason, I use Chrome as the default browser when testing in Cocos Creator. Fun fact though, I have only debugged a handful of times over the 11 games made with Cocos Creator.

I use inversify as dependency injection/inversion of control framework, with inversify-inject-decorators and reflect-metadata to integrate 3rd party classes into the DI through lazy injection, useful when injecting into cc.Component derived classes.

I also use @robotlegsjs/signals, a lightweight signals implementation. Dependency injection and signals provide a powerful base for the game architecture.

I use AirBnB’s polyglot for localization, typescript-logging for configurable logs (e.g. debug vs release), gsap for animations (mainly because I have familiarity with it from the Actionscript days).

I’m currently experimenting with wpapi, for interacting with the WordPress REST API and submitting scores. At the moment, only Don’t Worry uses this library.

I use gulp for automating tasks like deployment to live/local server.

I use the Chrome/Firefox dev tools for profiling. I also use Spector.js, a Chrome extension to profile WebGL draw calls, it’s been quite useful to gain insights and optimize rendering.

I use Git for source control (with TortoiseGit integration into the Windows shell) and Redmine for issue tracking and internal wiki system.

I use Shoebox to pack sprite atlases and FontForge to edit font files.

And that’s about it.