CocosSharp comes with a variety of particle systems. For example, the GoneBananas sample uses the sun particle system (CCParticleSun) to create an animated sun, as well as the explosion particle system (CCParticleExplode) to create an explosion effect whenever the monkey collides with a banana.

Although they are customizable, sometimes the built-in particle systems aren’t exactly what you want. Game developers often use particle system design tools for creating custom particle systems. One such commercial tool is the excellent Particle Designer from 71Squared.

Using Particle Designer is a great way to create custom effects and I was pleased to discover it works well with CocosSharp. For example, instead of using CCParticleExplode let’s change GoneBananas to instead use particle systems designed in Particle Designer, to create concentric exploding rings, as shown below:

Particle Designer has an export feature that supports a variety of export formats. In this case I exported the particle systems as plist files and added them to the respective Content folders of the CocosSharp iOS and Android projects respectively.

Then, to include them in the code, create a CCParticleSystemQuad for each particle system:

var particles = new[] { "innerring.plist", "outerring.plist" };

foreach (string p in particles) {
    var ps = new CCParticleSystemQuad (p);
    ps.Position = pt;
    AddChild (ps);
}

Now when you run the game, the custom particle systems appear as shown below: