Carrying on from last week, I’m continuing to evolve the gameplay to create a more coherent and compelling experience. Its still not quite there but its improving almost daily.

The code is now at a point where you can play through a single level. Its in a very raw form, and far from thrilling, but it demonstrates the core gameplay mechanic. The game engine is also generating the aforementioned level from an sqlite3 database. This will store the official levels for the game as well as any additional levels you create.

Next up is some early work on the level editor. I wan’t to get it working in a raw form and inserting levels into my database. This is a really important step since i’ll be using the editor to create all of the official level’s in the game. I expect the editor to become more sophisticated as development on the game progresses and further requirements are highlighted. The advantage of this is that the level editor that finally ships with the game will be powerful and highly polished.

In addition to this i’m also playing around with the customisation element of the game. This will actually play a fairly crucial role in the game so its important that it works in a raw form early on in development.

So overall progress is good, but there’s still a long road ahead.

I want to share an early screenshot of the game, but please bear in mind that nearly every element in it is likely to change before the game is released (Especially the art).

In other news, I recently joined the Touch Arcade private developer forums (You’ll need to sign up and request access to the forum.). These are a great resource with some really interesting discussions. I certainly recommend other devs take a look.

One particular thread pertaining to engines caught my eye. I’ve thought about creating my own re-usable engine in the past but am currently using the excellent cocos2d framework. However, I continually find that I barely utilise the wealth of features offered by cocos2d, instead preferring to utilise my own methods. As a result i’m now reconsidering the idea of developing my own lightweight 2d engine. I don’t want to disrupt my current game development so I don’t plan on ditching cocos2d just yet but I think it would be a great learning experience once this game has shipped.

I bought a few new books this week. The first is “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft” by Stephen King. This has been on my wish list for some time now, ever since it was recommended by a game designer. Apparently many of the concepts it discusses are not unique to writing novels. I haven’t dived into it yet but i’ll let you know if it turns out to be particularly useful.

The second is “The art of looking sideways” by Alan Fletcher. Its basically a melting pot of random design thoughts, ideas, and imagery – even the layout, colours, and typography used in the book are part of the experience. It makes a nice coffee table book to dip in and out of every once in a while.

Elsewhere, there’s lots of movement on the iPad front as it’s US release draws closer. Developers are ramping up the hype about their first iPad games and Apple are now accepting submissions ready for launch. Unfortunately, being based in the UK, I have to wait an extra month to get my hands on the device. I haven’t even touched the iPad SDK since downloading it and have no intention of doing so until I own the device. It will be interesting to see demand for these first round of games.

Now, back to Xcode…

This week has been an interesting one, i’ve been playing with 2D physics engines. More specifically i’ve been testing integration of the Chipmunk physics engine into my new game. I have to say, it didn’t take too long to get to grips with Chipmunk and the templates included in cocos2d give you a good starting point. Rather than moving objects to a specific point, you move them by applying forces to their body within the game space (which itself has a number of attributes such as gravity).

For anyone interested here are some of the tutorials I used to help me:

An Introduction to game physics with Chipmunk
Cocos2d Example – Bouncing Ball

Having imbued my game objects with real world physics, my game became instantly less appealing. The physics were great to play with but ultimately removed the enjoyment of the core game mechanics. Imagine if the original frogger had physics – without a drastic redesign of the core concept, you would lose the fun of the timing based mechanics and the satisfying feeling of solid, definite movement. So whilst it was a fun detour i’ve taken the decision to remove the physics and go back to basics for this game.

When i’m developing a new game I often create a number of sub projects to test out ideas. I feel i’ve done enough of these now to begin laying down solid code for the actual game. This ultimately involves taking longer to think about my classes and functions to ensure they are well written and flexible, whereas in the sub project stage I generally hard code variables and write some portions of the code inline.

In addition to implementing this core code, i’m now really in need of some visual design. Specifically, the style of the game and the placement of the GUI elements. This is certainly one of the phases that I really enjoy and of course it continues throughout the project. This is where i’ll be spending some time over the next few weeks.

In other news, it seems that Microsoft’s Courier device, which we saw a prototype interface for back in September last year, will be released in Q3/Q4 this year. Microsoft have also released more video of the prototype device.

Some publications are calling this a potential “iPad Killer” but I don’t really see them as competing devices. The iPad appears to be for casual users whereas the Courier looks to be aimed at creative professionals. I personally want the iPad for its development opportunities and for casual internet surfing. The Courier on the other hand looks like an excellent creative tool that could be used to enhance my game design process – essentially a digital Moleskine. I’m excited about the Courier and if Microsoft can pull it off I think it will renew my faith in them as a technology company.

I’ll leave you with a link to this interesting Twitter tag – #GameDevBookShelves – setup by @mysterycoconut. It’s always interesting to see what other developers are reading.

(Apple image courtesy of Abhijit Tembhekar)
(Courier image and video courtesy of Engadget)

I started this journey because I have a passion for video games and video game development. The iPhone platform presented me with an opportunity to develop a game for very little cost and publish it to a potential user base of millions. I won’t lie to you, the possibility to earn some money was a big draw and certainly acted as motivation in some small form.

I spent the first three months learning to program with Objective-C in Xcode. Coming from a Java and web scripting background, I expected to coast through but alas I found some of the concepts a bit difficult to get my head around. In the end it was sheer bloody minded determination and hours of late nights that saw things finally click into place for me. The first three months also made me realise that my original idea and code needed to be scrapped and I had to start again with a blank canvas (but this time with 3 months of experience to my name).

I think its relevant to share with you some of what was going on in my personal life. Whilst going through this learning process and developing my game, I had a full time job which made it difficult to spend as much time as I would have liked on my game. Mid way through my game development “journey” I was made redundant from my job. This gave me a new commodity, time, but with it a new worry, money! I was fortunate in that I was only out of work for a month before finding a new job. That month proved invaluable in allowing me to complete Star Fusion and submit it to the iPhone App store. Funny how things work out like that!

The final version of Star Fusion had changed significantly from my original concept. It was originally going to be loosely based on Icarus from greek mythology with winged creatures flying towards the Sun. Frustration at my basic animation and graphics skills forced me to abandon this and use a simpler theme. Utilising the cocos2d framework, development on Star Fusion was pretty fast and I completed the game in under a month. There were certainly difficulties but nothing that couldn’t be overcome by some late nights and lots of coffee!

After submitting Star Fusion and receiving some positive feedback I honestly believed that I would begin seeing a handful of downloads a day (at worst, I thought, 2 a day). How wrong I was. Initial sales of around 2/3 per day died quickly and within a few weeks I was constantly seeing 0 downloads/day. Its early days for my first update but so far i’ve seen only 1 new sale but a large number of existing users updating for free. Pretty gloomy from a financial perspective and i’m lucky that I have a full time job so I don’t rely on this.

So what’s the message? The message is one echoed by many indie iPhone game developers… The iPhone is a great platform to develop games for and you should definitely give it a go but do it for the right reasons. There is potential to make money if you manage to produce something that people click with, just don’t go in expecting it.

For me, it’s good enough that I can see my game on the app store. I get a lot of enjoyment from knowing that people, however few, have downloaded and played a game I designed and developed. Its been a great adventure so far and not one that I am going to give up on. I’m about to start work on my next game and look forward to seeing it in peoples hands.

Obviously the software you use will depend on your own requirements and tastes but for me this list represents my iPhone game development toolkit.

Hardware

1st Generation Macbook (1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo, 2 GB RAM)
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Cost: From £750 – This is the laptop I use for everyday use. I’ve had it for the past 3 years so i’m probably due an upgrade. It only has a 13.3″ screen but to be honest i’ve found it fine for iPhone development.

Wacom graphics tablet
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Cost: From £40 – This is by no means an essential item but I personally find that it helps enormously when creating and editing graphics. I used it when creating the majority of the graphics for Star Fusion.

Pencil and Paper
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Cost: A few pounds – For me at least, this was the most important tool for my project. I used it when designing the game concept and for the rapid prototyping of the interface. I subsequently used it for creating lists of the remaining tasks that needed to be done.

Software

I’ve split the software into sections to make it easy to identify what the packages were used for.

Development/Programming

Xcode & iPhone SDK
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Cost: Free – You can’t really avoid this one, they’re both required elements for iPhone development. The iPhone SDK contains the framework for developing iPhone applications whilst Xcode is the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for writing/compiling/debugging/building your code.

cocos2d for iPhone
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Cost: Free – cocos2d for iPhone is a framework for building iPhone games. It offers some great methods for handling layers, sprites, and menus. There are other frameworks out there but I found cocos2d to be perfect for my game.

Graphics

Inkscape
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Cost: Free – This is absolutely key to my development arsenal. All of the Star Fusion graphics were produced with this vector graphics package. It’s open source and Free and I highly recommend it.

Adobe Photoshop Elements
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Cost: £60 – This isn’t necessarily all that important but I personally tweak my graphics in Photoshop Elements once they have been created in Inkscape. It’s also good for resizing/scaling images and saving them in different formats.

Pencil Animation
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Cost: Free –  Pencil is a free animation package for the Mac. I spent some time searching for a good application and in the end settled on this. It lets you draw vectors frame by frame, also providing a traceable outline of your previous image.

Sound

CFXR
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Cost: Free – This is a free software package that lets you create simple sound effects and export them. Its and excellent application that will enable you to generate some sound effects in a matter of minutes. I can’t recommend this one enough. You can read my earlier post on this software here.

Bitnotic Chill
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Cost: $20 (about £15 after taxes) – This one will really depend on your skill as a sound engineer. If you’re good with sound then i’m sure you will find better methods for producing your own music. However, if you are looking for some soothing background music for your game then this software is excellent. It provides computer generated music with a number of tweakable parameters. You can read my earlier post on this software here.

Audacity
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Cost: Free – Audacity is a pretty complex application (for me at least). It lets you edit sound tracks, adding fade, splicing, cutting/pasting etc. If you know what you are doing then you could use this to really enhance the sounds you create. For Star Fusion I used it to combine two music tracks from Bitnotic Chill to create my final background music.

Project Management

OK, time for a bit of honesty here.  I wrote this post some time ago comparing project management software that was appropriate for iPhone game development. Unfortunately, although I had the best intentions, I ended up ditching my project management software in favor of checklists written on several hundred scraps of paper scattered around my apartment. I can tell you from professional experience that this a terrible way to manage a project. For my next game i’ll be switching back to one of these pieces of software.

Process 3
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Cost: $39 (about £25) – A nice piece of software that allows you to create checklists of tasks (including nesting). It also lets you gather resources for researching your project, e.g. websites, images, etc.

OmniOutliner
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Cost: $39 (about £25) – Similar to Process 3 but much more free form. It literally gives you a blank piece of paper and lets you add lists and research items such as images. I’m leaning towards this one for my next game.

Distribution

iPhone Developer Program
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Cost: $99 (about £60) – Nothing you can do about this one. If you want to distribute your game to the App Store then you will need to pay to join the developer program. It does give you access to lots of resources and if your game is good, fingers crossed, you’ll recoup this cost.

Promotion

You shouldn’t overlook this part of your game development. You’ll need a website to promote and support your game.

WordPress
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Cost: Free – A simple, customisable blogging platform that can be installed on most hosting packages or it can be hosted for you by WordPress (with less flexibility). As well as helping to promote your game, I found that my blog also gave me a way to record the work I had done, almost a basic project management tool.

Jing
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Cost: Free – This is a simple application that allows you to capture a video cast of what is happening on your computer screen. It then exports the file in flash format for easy hosting on your website. This is really useful for distributing gameplay footage and trailers.

Twitter
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Cost: Free – You knew this would be here right? It’s a pretty indispensable tool for promoting your game. It’s also good for following other iPhone game developers for hints, tips and networking with your peers. You can follow me here.

Optional Extras

Coffee (or your favorite beverage)
Cost: ummm, quite a lot depending on your mileage (£4/day) –  Coffee keeps me going through my development projects and also gives me an excuse to walk to the kitchen. Whilst away from the computer I often have eureka moments.

Music
Cost: Free if you play your existing collection – Most of the time I like to work in silence but sometimes its nice to have some background noise (Although a trip to the local coffee shop is good for this. A change of surroundings can go along way). For me I usually throw The Thrills or some Damien Rice into my sound system.

So there you have it. A complete list of the tools I used to create Star Fusion. I hope you find it useful. Why not add your own suggestions to the comments below.

• The sun can be dragged along the y-axis.
• “Enemies” approach the sun at varying speeds and positions.
• The score counter increments correctly.
• The liquid in the thermometer can be increased/decreased by dragging.

So, to share the concept with you, its fairly simple. The Icarus inspired enemies will approach the sun and it’s your job to destroy them. This is accomplished by dragging the sun along the y-axis to intercept them. There is of course a twist, with the sun’s strength being controlled by a thermometer. Different enemies will require different amounts of Sun to destroy them and it will be up to you to select the right strength by dragging the liquid in the thermometer. The basic aim will be to score as many points as possible (although i’m still working on the details of this).

I’ve replaced all of the temporary placeholder graphics (basic geometric shapes up until now) with some very early, very unpolished, and in no way finalised, graphics. So to finish off this post, here is the first taster screenshot of the game…

Icarus early screenshot

“Alas for him! Warmer and warmer grew the air. Those arms, that had seemed to uphold him, relaxed. His wings wavered, dropped. He fluttered his young hands vainly-he was falling-and in that terror he remembered. The heat of the sun had melted the wax from his wings; the feathers were falling, one by one, like snowflakes; and there was none to help.”

Icarus is the working title for my new game. It’s currently in the very early stages of development whilst I get up to speed on the cocos2d-iphone framework that i’ll be using. I’d like to share a lot more on this games development, so to kick things off here’s an early conceptual doodle…

Icarus early concept scribble