Sound Approval, Pixel Formats, About Menu, and Loading Indicator

I've managed to get approval to use a few sounds from http://www.freesound.org/ in Wormies, which is awesome (thanks to Jan 'fresco' Ripper, Ben Hillyard, and 'junggle'). Still waiting on responses from two other sound creators. If I don't hear back, I'll have to record the sounds myself. I'm doing all this because the license for using sound files from Freesound is a bit odd with commercial products. It seems to be okay if I "sample, mash-up, or otherwise creatively transform" sounds, but not if I use them in their original state (unless I get permission from the creators). The wording is a bit ambiguous, so I'm taking the safe route.

I messed around a bit with pixel formats for my sprites. It's much more memory efficient (and a bit faster) to use 16-bit textures instead of 32-bit for sprites, but they tend to look bad with gradients and details. I ended up keeping 32-bit depth for everything but the game icons (such as food items, predator warning graphics, etc), which are generic enough to look about the same either way. Hopefully this will be a good reduction in memory use.

Since I'm trying to round things out nicely, I created an about menu option. It brings up a sprite (with pre-rendered text/graphics) with information about the author (me), sound attribution, image credits, and the cocos2d logo.

Finally, I added a nice loading icon using Apple's standard UIActivityIndicatorView (the awesome swirling wait cursor thing). I think this is a nice touch, since the CocosDenshion sound library added a bit of time to the loading (which was near-instantaneous before). Not bad for a day's work.