pixality...

My intention is to use this space to record my experiences as I venture into the world of iOS game development using Objective-C, cocos2d, Kobold2d and any other useful bits and bobs I find along the way...

[willibobds]

Hyperion - Lone Starfighter released!!

Yay!

My first game has been accepted into the App Store.

It took just 7 days to get through the review process.

Get it here.

[willibobds]

Time to get this going properly now...

Right, I've neglected this blog for a long time now whilst I was getting to grips with cocos2d. I hope to be a bit more active on it in the future.

I've just submitted my first game to the AppStore for review so fingers crossed!!

My first game is called 'Hyperion - Lone Starfighter'. It's a horizontal scrolling space shooter. I know its been done soooo many times but it was more an exercise in going through the whole process end to end than creating a ground breaking product.

For anyone looking at getting to grips with iPhone development using Objective-C, cocos2d, box2d, etc. then I'd highly recommend you get yourself over to http://www.raywenderlich.com/

If you've never checked it out then I suggest you make some time to do so.

Ray has put together some starter kits and I used his Space Game Starter Kit to get me going with my project.

I found that using the starter kit and the documentation that goes along with it (the documentation basically takes you step by step through the process of creating the starter kit with an explanation for each section of code) worked really well for me in speeding up the learning process and it provides a fantastic foundation for making your own game.

Right now I'm waiting for my game to be reviewed. I'll post the results when I get them.

[willibobds]

Shiny new addition to the family...

It's taken a few weeks to arrive but I now have a shiny 15" MacBook Pro to do my game development on. First thing I did was to install the latest version of Xcode and then Kobold2D. All went smoothly but I did hit a bit of a wall when I tried running a new project I'd created using the Kobold2D Project creation app. The new project build failed within the cocos3d library code. Luckily there is a fantastic Kobold2D & cocos2d community so a quick Google returned a post with a fix for the line of code which was failing. Once applied, the project built & ran successfully. So I now have my dev environment set up and just need to clear some time to get stuck in to finalising the design and get cracking on the coding. On the subject of the buddy-up website, I've made a start on getting that together so hopefully the first iteration will be up soon. 'Til next time...

[willibobds]

It's been a wee while...

It's been a while since my last post so thought I'd best check in... I've been working on the plan for my game and have also been reading Steffen Itterheim's excellent cocos2d book (2nd edition) which has been updated for iOS5. It also gives an introduction to kobold2d. The next step is to create the graphics for my game. I've been doing some sketching and as I said previously, I'm no graphic artist so I'll need to see how they turn out. My awareness of my lack of talent in the graphics creation department got me thinking about buddying-up with someone local who I could collaborate with, hopefully someone with an artistic flair. I started scouring the web for a site where I might find some such person and couldn't find one! So as a parallel project I'm going to put a site together to serve this purpose. It'll be somewhere that people can register their skillset and a few other details with a view to creating/joining a team for collaboration on development projects. I'll put up some details of the site once I get the first iteration ready. Bye for now...

[willibobds]

Game ideas...

I think I've settled on an idea for my first game...

Anyone old enough to remember the 48k ZX Spectrum will remember the games by Ultimate Play The Game.

They were responsible for such gems as Sabre Wulf, Underwurlde, JetPac, Lunar Jetman and my personal favourite...Atic Atac.

I'm actually going to do a JetPac style game which involved building a spaceship then filling it with fuel whilst fending off hordes of aliens. Once the ship was full you'd get in it and it would take off taking you to the next level.

I'm hoping that should be a reasonably good project to get me familiar with Kobold2d and cocos2d.

Now I'm no graphic artist but I'll have a go at putting some bits together. I can always swap the sprites out for some decent ones later. I'll concentrate on gameplay methinks.

Time to make a plan...

[willibobds]

Bit of an intro in case anyone's watching

Okay, well I'm currently a SQL Developer/DBA for a company called ESI (www.esi.info) based in Stirling, Scotland. I'm also a VB.Net & Asp.Net developer. I've been a developer for about 11 years which makes me feel quite old! Bought my first iPhone about 2 1/2 years ago so it was a 3G S. Naturally I wanted to start developing for the iPhone almost instantly but found Objective-C very difficult to get into, mostly couldn't get used to the bracketing and the memory management. It probably would've helped if I'd come from a C background of some flavour but I didn't. I toyed with a couple of frameworks especially the excellent DragonFireSDK (www.dragonfiresdk.com) and managed to get the bare bones of my first game together quite quickly. This was using C++ which I hadn't used before so there was a learning curve which I found quite steep. Whilst learning C++ I had a constant niggle that I should be spending this time biting the bullet with Objective-C but ended up doing neither!! About 6 months ago I came across some free iTunesU content on iPhone development. It was the videos from the CS193P course run by Paul Hegarty at Stanford University. This got me hooked! I 110% recommend getting hold of this content if you're starting out with iOS development. The content has since been updated for iOS 5 so I've downloaded those too and am steadily getting through them. As a direct result of the CS193P course material I've managed to complete my first app entirely in Objective-C. Its a crossword app for the iPad. My goal was to get through the process of learning the fundamentals of Objective-C and as it worked out I've actually ended up with some fairly useful bits of code which I can reuse. It's not entirely complete and only contains 1 actual crossword but I'll get it finished soon and submit it to the app store. I'll post details of my progress.