There’s a lot happening today. I’ve got almost all of my art assets from my artist and the game is starting to look really great. Sound FX and music assets are starting to arrive from my sound guys, but I haven’t had the time to put the assets into the game yet. However, I’ve played the game and played the music through my headphones and I’m getting really excited about how it sounds. Likewise with the sound FX.

Friday afternoon I started implementing a UI/Front-End system for the game and I continued with that this afternoon. I’ve been torn about how best to implement this stuff. I was thinking about using the UIKit widgets and skinning them with my own art, but this causes a bunch of problems. The main problem is that the iPhone OpenGL ES docs explicitly recommends against it citing all kinds of potential performance issues. So I’ve decided to write a simple UI Widget class that I can sub-class into various widgets. It seems kind of stupid to not be able to use all the iPhone’s handy UI classes, but oh well. Luckily I don’t really have anything too complicated in the front-end; mostly just things like buttons and sliders.

On the business side of things I’m starting to get nervous. At this point I’ve now sunk 5 months of my time plus a fair amount of money into paying contractors and other business expenses and I can see the end of the process approaching. At the start of the process, having a completed game seemed so far in the distance. Now that it’s fast approaching, it’s a little nerve-racking. I’m hoping the game sells well, but now I have to start thinking about things like: pricing, marketing, and advertising. I guess I’d better start doing some research…

Owen