In our latest game dev adventure, we were looking for a way to use our sticker app as a level editor for our upcoming puzzle app that uses the same set of assets.

A little backstory…

Our latest app allows users to pull an image from a tray at the top of the screen and resize it, rotate it, flip it and place it onto a background to build a scene. It’s basically a sticker book, or for those of you over 30, it’s like Colorforms.

Our next app is a jigsaw puzzle that, upon completion, is filled with interactive characters. It also just happens to use the same backgrounds and stickers from the aforementioned project.

…so, as I was saying, we needed an editor that would allow us to place the characters in the puzzle (to avoid painstakingly positioning them a pixel at a time.)

THE HACK

Since the sticker app saves each scene you build in a file called stickerData.txt, and the touchscreen controls work much better on an actual device than our mouse-and-keyboard app simulator, we hacked the app so that we could tap a button on the options menu to email out the stickerData.txt file from the device.

Now I can position the characters anyway I want on the iPad and email that data to my partner without even touching my computer. Here’s to creative solutions *clink!