Ios

Based on all the horror stories I had read from other developers, I really thought I got out easy submitting Tea Time! It only took a week and a half to approve, there were no complications, and I was able to change to a company status half way through. I guess I really got out too easy and Apple had to remedy that. Today I found that Tea Time! shows up in the App Store listings, but it’s unavailable when you try to buy it. When I looked in the app management site, much to my surprise, Tea Time! was listed as “Pending Contract”. ...

I was just pleasantly surprised to see that my new sales contract as Snappy Touch for the App Store was approved and that Tea Time! is once again available for sale. I was fearing it would be gone for days, but the blackout only lasted about a day. Not too bad. The only difference is that now it’s listed with Snappy Touch being the seller instead of my name. Will this be the end of the App Store saga? Let’s hope so. ...

I’ve been working full time on an iPhone app for the last three months. Realistically, I still have another month ahead of me. Four months is nothing compared to projects for current game consoles, but it’s pretty long for an iPhone app. It’s not like I’m slacking off (I swear that playing WoW has nothing to do with it!), but it’s a relatively complex project for an iPhone, involving 3D graphics, procedural geometry generation, custom user interface, and network access among other things. Definitely not your everyday, quick iPhone app. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to take a few days off from my project to enjoy the holidays with friends and family. Of course, I couldn’t stop thinking about the project. Soon my thoughts turned to how much more I had to go, and how some parts of the development process were still unknown to me, like the Apple submission process, or making a build for distribution on the App Store. At that point, inspiration struck, and I decided to use one day during the holidays to write a quick, one-day app. That way it wouldn’t take any time away from my project and I would learn a lot from it. And maybe, just maybe, I would make a buck or two in the process. ...

My first iPhone app, Tea Time!, just hit the App Store today! Tea lovers of the world: Go get it now. What am I doing writing a little app like that? Don’t worry, that’s not what I’ve been doing for the last few months :-) It was an experiment to see how quick I could put a simple app together and getting the experience of going through the whole cycle with the App Store. Tomorrow I’ll write an entry with all that I’ve learned so far. ...

Are you doing iPhone development? Are you in the San Diego area? Come meet a bunch of local iPhone developers next week. It will be an informal gathering, just to get to know each other, trade war stories, and bitch about the App Store over pizza and beers. Feel free to invite anybody interested as well. When: Wednesday January 14th from 7PM until whenever Where: Karl Strauss Brewery in Mira Mesa Hope to see you all there!

I haven’t started doing any real performance optimizations on my iPhone app yet. I pretty much ported it from the original PC version, saw that it was running rather slow (2-3 fps) so I changed the number of elements on the screen until it was an “acceptable” 15 fps and left it there until I had time to come back and optimize things towards the end. I even ran it through some of the iPhone performance gathering tools and saw that it was spending half the time in the simulation and half the time rendering. A bit surprising, but it’s not like I had much to compare it against since this was my first performance-intensive iPhone app. ...

Apple is very aware that a crucial aspect to the success of a new platform is getting developers on board. Requiring a Mac for all iPhone development isn’t a good start. That’s the first barrier of entry for a lot of developers, like me, who came from a Linux or Windows background. Strike one. Objective C, even though I have come to like it, isn’t exactly a hot, popular language (although that’s changing a bit). Strike two. Fortunately, Apple doesn’t strike out and gets everything else right. They provide a top-notch development environment, tools, and great APIs. Don’t worry, I’m not going to get into the details of the iPhone API. You can get all that and more from Apple’s iPhone development web site. I’m just going to talk about my experience starting with a new set of APIs and how they hold up in the process of a full project development. ...

A few days ago I went out to lunch with some friends and they brought up an interesting thought: Will 2009 be the year of the indie developer? I loved the sound of that! I’ve been an indie developer for a year and a half, and I’m seeing more and more people taking tha route. I think indie development is necessary for a healthy game development industry. Where else are people going to try weird ideas, experimental development techniques, an commercially unproven designs? I think it’s a sign of maturity that we’re seeing a need filled by independent development next to the Maddens and Worlds of Warcraft and other chart-toppers. ...

I have a feeling I don’t fit the profile for the average iPhone developer. I bet a lot of them come from Mac or Web development backgrounds. On the other hand, I come from over the years of professional game development on consoles and PCs, which gives me a different perspective on things. When I hear developers complaining about Apple’s approval process to put something on the App Store, I can’t help but laugh and wish they had a taste of submitting an Xbox or PS3 game for approval. Now, that’s a real bitch! On the other hand, long-time Mac developers will be throwing around all these API names and classes like everybody learned them in kindergarden. I’ve only been doing iPhone development for a few months, so I don’t claim to know everything. But they have been some intensive couple of months, that’s for sure. This is my attempt to share my experiences, and hopefully encourage more game developers to take the leap and consider this really fun little machine. As I explained in a previous post, I was a Mac-virgin. Sure, I had used one here and there, but never as my primary platform. Not only was I able to get up to speed and functional in a matter of days, but I totally love it and switched to it as my main computer. So, with that out of the way, how about the iPhone development itself? Over the next few days (or weeks, depending how busy I get), I’ll try and cover the major areas of iPhone development that I’ve experienced so far. Let’s get the most obvious one out of the way: Objective C. ...

I’ve worked with many operating systems over the years: from the humble CP/M, to early versions of DOS, to Windows 3.0 (if you can even call that an OS), along with many different versions of Linux since 1993, a smattering of VMS, and, of course, all the recent flavors of Windows. But somehow, I always managed to avoid Apple operating systems. Starting iPhone development was a bit of a change since it required me to work exclusively under OSX and use a new IDE (XCode). I had talked to people who found the change very cumbersome and found the new environment got in their way, so I approached it with a bit of trepidation. ...

I know that things have been very quiet over here for the last few weeks. Lots of stuff happening and it’s hard to find time to write sometimes. But now I should be getting back into the swing of things and updating Games from Within more regularly. The big news is that we decided to call it quits on Power of Two Games. It was an amazing experience and I learned a huge amount. I’m sure we’ll write a postmortem with some of the gems we learned along the way sometime soon. Unlike most postmortems, we really don’t have any office politics, bosses to suck up to, or publishers to keep happy, we’ll be able to be brutally honest. ...