Andrew Larking's Blog

Hello. Just to say, currently I store my images on my Microsoft Live account, but this has been causing some problems with this tumblr blog.  I’ll be keeping all my images on my online space soon, in the meantime please try to ignore all the missing stuff.

New game video will be up soon, have one more piece of code to finish first.

It’s all go, apart from when I suffer yet another power cut.  It’s like living in a ghetto, I’m tempted to run a cable from the street lamp which seems to always have power.

Project X is almost complete, at least in terms of core code.  Physics, parallax, controls, UI states, menu systems and scene switching is all built.  Next up is to swivel the screen to suit the current landscape state (my game wont support portrait) and deal with incoming calls, saving user ad game data.  But I feel that will be simpler (err).

My game is a remake of the classic 80’s and 90’s Lunar Lander games.  It will sport fancy new graphics, multiple planets and scenarios, tricky landing platforms in some treacherous places, and an assortment of landing craft.  All up I think if I was working full time, this game has so far taken about 10 days to code.  If I started again, after learning all this stuff, I think it’s a morning’s work.  And in fact, once finished I will be re-coding the lot from scratch, turning it into a more object oriented set of classes and methods.  Expect it to be submitted to Apple in 4-5 weeks.  Expect screen shots sooner, just need to start working on level design.

Hello.

Here are some links I found useful when getting started with coding games for the iPhone.  Enjoy.

Cocos2D Forum

Objective-C Primer

71 Squared

Chipmunk Physics

Spacemanager

Where to start?  10 months away from Cocoa and I forget everything.  I thought about watching the iTunesU stuff again, but video tutorials longer than 10 minutes make me forget what I already knew and force me into a deep vegetative state.  I prefer reading complex things and making notes on the pages.  I have purchased ‘Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, Third Edition’ by Aaron Hillegass to kickstart the learning.  As I’ve already decided I’m using Cocos2D, Chipmunk and SpaceManager I’ve grabbed all the documentation for those projects also, along with every example of code I can find (they all come with example projects you can compile and run which helps).

As I stated in the Project X into, I work with proxy visual elements until the code base is ready to receive the final visuals, I then swap out the sprites and hopefully, at that point, the game will become almost ready.  To this end, using Illustrator I produced a Lego kit of visual elements for the player…

which let me build things like…

I do the same with proxy background elements which allow me to test the parallax, which the game will be using to achieve that classic early 90’s feel  This means the elements nearer the screen will move more than the elements further away.  Modern 3D games are nice, but I miss the days of the Amiga 500.  Little Big Planet is the closest I’ve seen in recent days.

All the proxy visuals are created in Illustrator, and I’m still deciding what the final look of the game will be, either full rendered 3D as per the shelved ‘Invaders’ project…

or fully 2D, for which I don’t have an example to post.

But for now, I need to get programming, so onwards to Xcode.

The iPad is here.

Well, it’s been here for a while I know.  Apple are currently selling an iPad every three seconds, that’s a lot of people playing with a lot of new toys, and downloading an awful lot of apps.  The time to be a developer on the iRange has never been better, especially with the more recent release of the iPhone 4 and iOS 4.

It’s because of this I’ve decided to trim down my current range of languages and API’s to a minimal amount, based around the iRange and HTML5.

Gone is AS3, C#, PHP, SQL and XAML (among others).  In are Obj-C, JAVA, HTML5.  That’s it, no more, no less.

I released a simple game for the iPhone a while back with my mate Dan, but quite  a lot has changed since then.  I decided the best way to get back into developing for the iThings was to release a simple iPhone/iPod Touch game and use that to study up on language change, new frameworks and new capabilities of the iOS.

This test game will be making use of Cocos2D & Chipmunk Physics (implemented with the very nice SpaceManager) and will be a multi level physics based classic.  That’s all I’m saying for now.  I’ll be posting my progress here along with sneak peaks of the visual elements.  I shall call this ‘Project X’.

Whilst doing this I’ll be working with some friends on some iPad applications, designed to make use of that spectacular screen.

Wish me luck.

Hello.

After working heavily with AS3 for a fair while now, and getting very comfortable coding in it, I’ve jacked it in.  HTML5 and Objective-C are my new tools of choice.  Flash will be around for a long time yet, but honestly I cannot see a reason to stay with it.  HTML5 will be where I sit with regards to web coding, and obviously Objective-C for iPhone/Pod/Pad development.

Goodbye Flash, you were good to me, but now it’s time to go.