So I'm finally getting some time this week to get to grips with developing for the iPhone for work, just a simple dashboard app first, baby steps and all that.
Anyhoo, over the weekend and in preparation for this I did a bit more reading up and got sidetracked down the line of games programming and so how to get started. The upshot is that I've paid my £59 and signed up for the iPhone developer programme for myself. I'm fully aware that so far I've never actually gotten to the stage of releasing Crania on WM (although I get to play the damned near finished version myself) but I think that is a reasonable enough price even if I don't release anything in year one.
In addition to this I've also bought another book, but in a first for me it's an online and pdf only book. And even more interesting it isn't even finished yet! I've used the O'Reilly Rough Cuts service to get a copy of the pre-published iPhone Game Development book. A great idea in my opinion. I've also watched and read a number of tutorials and am hoping to get enough free time over the next week to knock up a proof of concept. So whilst I wait for the activation email and before I get to finish the signing up process I've got time to make some design decisions and even delve into the code itself. One down side of the Apple sign up process is that to have a company name you have to have a real company (!) and so the games will have to be released under my own name instead, no biggy I suppose.
How I'm going to do it!Still a couple of major decisions to be taken, the biggest being do I go down the road of OpenGL ES, I am leaning heavily in that direction at the moment as although Crania probably wouldn't need the performance I'm sure that should I decide to revisit VSTOL and maybe even FormFighter that they would need the OpenGL power to get past the hurdle that prevented either of them seeing the light of day on WM.
I'm pretty sure that most of my game engine code for Crania will be easily ported as the main guts of it was written in C, the code for creating the initial layout of each puzzle and checking if it has been solved at each step shouldn't need much work. The collision detection which was always a bit messy and had to have additional code to give it a helping hand in positioning the crates will be scrapped in favour of simple positional checks.
As the original control method included touch screen buttons I'll no doubt continue with the same control mechanic, I'm just not sure that you would get a responsive enough control using tilt to move the crane.
The graphics will no doubt go through another bout of reworking to try and bring them up to scratch for the correct size required, this will once again push my pixel manipulation skills to the max .
I'm thinking that I'll probably try and create a simple 5-10 level iCrania Lite first with the same single play mode as the original. Once I have everything running I can then turn my attention to the deluxe version and all the ideas that I've been milling over for ages now.
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