A new day, a new week. My post on Friday wasn’t very cheerful, so I thought I’d follow up with what came out of that. It turns out that pushing through and forcing myself to code was the right course of action in this instance. By the end of the day on Friday I had implemented one of the new end conditions I had been going over in my head. It turns out that it’s actually pretty cool. It seems to balance the game a lot better. I find that I’m losing the game in different places now, and I feel like I have a lot more control over the outcome of the game. This is a good thing. I think this is the solution I’ll be working with for now. It will undoubtedly need extensive play-testing and tuning, but I think it’s a good direction.

A friend of mine from Vancouver was in town over the weekend and we had a chance to meet up for a cup of coffee and chat. We were talking about the game I was working on and then started talking about iPhone games. After our conversation I started thinking more and more about iPhone/iPod Touch development. My plan was to build my game and release it for PC and Mac, then port it to the iPhone at some point. Now I’m starting to wonder if I should try to get a simplified version going for the iPhone sooner, rather than later.

I started thinking about it and realised that most of my time spent gaming recently has been on my iPod Touch. I have it with me all the time, so when I’m on the subway, or waiting in a long line-up somewhere, out comes the iPod for a quick game of Trism, or De Blob.

So I started wondering how much work it would be to port my prototype to the iPhone. I already have a Mac, and I’ve been using XCode to do my prototype development so far. All I’d need to do is download the SDK, learn Objective C and rewrite the rendering part of my game. Hah…sounds easy!

Obviously I don’t have a tonne (yes, that’s a metric tonne) of time to devote to this, but I’m thinking I might spend two days and see how far I get. At the end of two days, if it looks like I can have something running within the week, I’ll keep going. If not, I’ll look at priorities and see where it might fit in the schedule.

Owen

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 6:56 am and is filed under Design, Project Management, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.