360iDev Impressions - Day 2

Tuesday opened with a informative panel that covered a bunch of issues including the upcoming Mac App Store, and Android vs. iPhone development.

Then on to Tim Burks' Get Your Head in the Clouds talk. I learned about a lot of really cool tools I hadn't dealt with, especially ASIHTTPRequest, which I think I will find a lot of uses for. Tim was very prepared, but it was at times a difficult talk, as he got questions ranging from subtle differences between Heroku and AppEngine to "What is this Amazon S3 you keep mentioning?". It's really hard to speak to an audience of just widely ranging needs and skill sets, but he did so admirably well.

Next, I went to Brent Simmons-Epic Software Re-use talk. It had many great and wise architecture insights, but I, personally, was expecting more detail, or in other words more code. The insights, though, were very valuable, so I expect as I look back on it over time, I'll be able to get over my initial missed expectations.

Lunch was Jessica Kahn from Tapulous, now part of Disney talking about GameCenter. I really enjoyed her talk at the iPhone development class that Stanford University put up on iTunes, and her hands-on demo of GameCenter didn't disappoint.

Next I took Brian Robbins' class on Building a Non-Hit Driven Business, 6 months later. I had bought and watched his talk from the previous 360iDev, so it was good to hear the follow-up. I appreciate his candor and practicality, and it was the kind of real information that doesn't show up much in books.

Group session on Tuesday ended with the "Think First, Code Later" panel, with several authors and app developers talking to us about the processes by which they design apps. A wide range of educated and experienced opinions on display there.

And then, Tuesday night, all night, we had the Game Jam, which I wrote about here.

360iDev Impressions - Day 1

Monday morning, David Whatley did a great keynote that was based on this video. He talked about what happened at his company when he instituted a Results Only Work Environment. It was very interesting, and ended with this. Which is the coolest way to end a keynote, ever.

I started with Tom Frauenhofer's Cocos2D class, which is probably the class in which I learned the most the whole conference, but that's largely because I had never touched cocos2d before, so I had a lot to learn. Tom was very organized, and taught us enough that I managed to actually write a game prototype 36 hours later.

Next up was Steven Hugg (of HeyTell fame) talking about viral apps. He broke the different factors in viral apps down into an analog of the Drake Equation, and talked to us about each factor and how to try to affect it in our apps. Very well done, very educational.

Michael Simmons talked to all of us at lunch about his considerable experience with marketing and pricing apps, and was very enjoytble and well received.

Then I went to Joe Keeley's talk on Quartz 2D and met the QuartzMonster. I'd used the quartz framework on a couple of apps I'd done before and gotten it work via trial and error, so it was very nice to get a better understanding of what I had been doing.

Last class of Monday, I went to a talk by Noel Llopis of Flower Garden fame. It was a fascinating look at in-app purchases from his game and others, along with some summaries of talks from other (non-iPhone) game designers, and has the capability to dramatically increase the profitability of the whole iPhone app ecosystem, once we understand the implications. It totally changed the way I look at app profitability (although now I have to figure out what to do about it).

And the evening group session was the Legendary Mike Lee. It was a great, motivating kick in the ass that I needed (and I don't think I was the only one who felt that way).

Monday closed with a very enjoyable after-party. It was a great first (real) day.

360iDev Impressions - Day 0

The first class I took was Kendall Gelner's Advanced Debugging class. It was really, really good. I learned about using the Mac "User Interface" instrument to record and play back simulator events for debugging and how to create custom instruments with DTrace. It was a well organized, very useful talk.

Sunday afternoon I took Saul Mora's Unit Testing that Doesn't Suck class. It didn't go as well. The class was predicated on the attendees having GHUnit and MacRuby, and the hotel WiFi completely failed under the load (and not for the last time during the conference). We learned about some of the cool utilities in Saul's GitHub account, but the class didn't manage to reach its full potential because it took us so long to get the software prerequisites installed.

Color Mixing with Multitouch #360iDevGJ Game Jam Post 8

OK, It's more fun and more challenging now, although I'm not sure anyone would buy it, even if I polished it.

It was way too easy, so I took a cue from @OwenGoss's Dapple and put in a color mixing element.

So now there are 6 colors of spaceships and 6 colors of shields but still only 3 buttons:

So if you want to block the green aliens, you have to hit the Blue and Yellow buttons at the same time while the green spacecraft enters the atmosphere.

I tried a bit to get a video, but multi-touch in the simulator is way too hard, I have no idea how long it would take to get iSimulate working (I'm running on XCode 3.2.[REDACTED], iOS 4.[REDACTED]GM), or even if it would work at all, so you'll just have to take my word for it.

The good news is, with only a dozen or so of us left, the Internet only feels like 56K dialup.

So now, I'm into the part of game design that throws me: the balancing (for lack of a better word).

There are some games that, when you fail, make you want to throw the controller at the wall and give up in frustration. There are other games that, when you fail, make you think to yourself "I was SOOOO close". While which games fall into which categories vary from player to player, a lot of designers seem to get it right a high percentage of the time.

I'm not one of those designers :).

So I'm going to think about what I want to do for carrot/stick (e.g. points/achievements and game over). I don't have an initial guess because, honestly, I didn't think I'd get far enough tonight that I'd need to worry about it, so I hadn't even thought about it.

The amazing thing is that I've gotten this far, especially since I have mostly not had good enough connectivity to do google searches. I've had the beta draft of the Apress cocos2d book, the Doxygen output for the cocos2d-iphone repo (and of course, the repo's source code), and Tom Frauenhofer's example project from yesterdayMonday morning. That this even feels like it might be a game is a tribute to the ease of use of cocos2d and how good Tom's class was.

It's a Game! (Not sure if it's any fun, yet, though) #360iDevGJ Game Jam Post 7

So it actually kind of looks like a game now. I need scoring, I guess, and some consequences, but the idea is there.

From The List:
1. Get a cocos2d hello world screen showing the big blue ball royalty-free NASA supplied image
2. Get a quick sprite to be the bad guy on the screen.
3. Cover the world in an opaque block when screen is touched and restore it when touches end
4. Make the alien move.
5. Make the alien able to collide with the block.
6. Make the game over popup if the alien collides with the world while the block isn't up.
7. Make aliens and shields of different colors.
8. Make a stream of aliens.
9. See if it's any fun at all.

4 items down, 7 hours to go.