First things first: I finally took the plunge and purchased an Apple Developer License under my name. Many of you probably wouldn't make a face over having to drop a mere hundred dollars, but for me the purchase signified a commitment to following this iPhone development adventure through all of the way, and to work hard to get our masterpieces [subjective] up and onto the glittering promised land that is the App Store.
The main (or least the immediate) upshot of getting this license is that I can now sign my code and have it run on devices. For me, my only test device is my own personal iPhone, which is just fine with me! I can't express how cool it was to see my transparent rotating sprite showing up on my own phone -- after a lengthy bureaucratic process of course. Still, it was a huge motivational leap for me, and had the added bonus that I could essentially whip out my phone on a whim during the day and show my friends and co-workers my progress on my game literally as I developed it. Nifty!
Speaking of my delving into iPhone development..
It might seem a little soon to be doing so, but I will be delivering a short-ish public presentation at my uni (University of Waterloo) for the UW Game Development Club about my recent foray into iPhone game development with SDL. I'll be talking about the highlights of my experiences, going over some history and details about the iPhoneOS platform, what is needed to get started in writing games for the platform, and lunge into several runnable examples showcasing 2D and 3D graphics basics.We're throwing around the idea of video recording the presentation, in which case I'd gladly toss it up on YouTube for public consumption, but that will be entirely dependent on one of the execs finding a camera in time. Don't hold your breath. [grin]
Pop by UW-GDC.com if you'll be in the area.
More progress on the 2D engine.
Despite being a rather busy humanoid lately, I've still been finding time here and there to slowly progress further on my 2D engine built atop the iPhone-flavoured SDL library. Why, I can almost envision me actually using it to *make* a darned game one of these days! =P
I implemented an entity management system first, which in English roughly translates to: I can toss lots of different types of 'things' (which for now are 2D sprites with different drawing logic and updating logic) at my game in a rather high-level fashion, and have the game more or less just 'take care of it'. This isn't a new concept to anyone here who has written any semblance of a game, of course. [smile]
A nice interface to the two input methods: the touch screen and the accelerometer. The former simply detects touch-begin, touch-moved, and touch-ended events, each with an associated unique index, and propagates each of the three event types to all registered 'touch listener' objects. In the context of my little 'test app', this is a ship sprite that flies itself toward the nearest active touch. The accelerometer is treated as a 3-axis joystick by SDL, which makes it simple enough to query for values. Moving the iPhone to various angles results in the aforementioned ship slowly sliding downward along the current vector of gravity.
Sprite animation. The below sprites are happily marching in a pretty animate fashion down the screen. Into oblivion, soon, once one can fire weapons at them. [smile]
(Trying to pilot my ship to charge the advancing infantry head-on via the touch screen.)
I'm getting pretty excited at this point, since only a few more key system, like a particle engine, font rendering, and playing audio remain until I can actually begin making some games!
Until next time, kind reader.
Hope your presentation went well!