Program With Dave

Today I began the development of my iPad game. I’ve chosen to do an ad-supported, free word search game. I think it will be better than the competition because I am going to make use of the entire screen for the searching field and also check for common problems in word searches such as words-within-words.

There will be a classic gameplay mode called casual and also an arcade mode where you find as many words as you can in a given amount of time.

I began development today on the classes which will populate the word field. I had to learn a few new details about NSString that I didn’t know before. I am still relatively new to objective-c and it is quite a departure from C# which I develop with every day.

It is going to use cocos2d in order to get some fancy graphic effects.

Good thing I began programming with standard c years ago or I’d be completely lost!

So, I played the game Space Miner on the iPhone. I’ve decided I can’t compete with that. The physics are there, the control scheme is almost exactly what I had in mind, and it’s a freakin’ asteroids game with all kinds of cool stuff on top of it. So, the asteroids game is out. It’s back to square one.

The good news is that I am now the proud owner of a shiny new iPad. The market for iPad applications is relatively small right now, also. So I am going to shift over to writing a game for the iPad. I have an idea that is going to be based off of some old code that I wrote when playing around with Irrlicht. It’s a game much like Homeworld though not quite as complex.

I’ve deleted my asteroids plan. I’m moving on!