One Insightful M*******cker

I’ve been spending a lot of free time working on my iPhone game lately and I’m happy to say that I’m making slow but (somewhat) steady progress. I have to admit though, since I already had a decent background in Mac OS X programming prior to my foray into iPhone dev’ing, the hurdles working with the iPhone SDK haven’t been too bad. Plus, I used some of my NSDocument-based app skills to whip up a Mac graphical texture/polygon editor for the physics system I’m using (with full undo/redo ‘n everything).

So far, I’ve made decent headway on the graphics/physics loop and the asset loading, but I’ve still got a long way to go ’til a complete game. Having spent a good 8 hours building my polygon editor, I’m kind of dreading the task ahead of building a full level editor. But I think the benefits of having a full level editor for the game will be well worth the effort (hello, user created content). On top of that, it’ll definitely help in terms of front loading a lot of the work on the game design itself. Being able to edit the game quickly will undoubtedly save me a lot of stress when it comes to building compelling levels. In any case, that’s still a ways off…
In my excitement this past month to get things rolling, I hired an artist to create some the graphics for the character in my game. At the time I hired him, the design was still up in the air, so the results are based on a concept that has since changed quite a bit. In any case, he came through with flying colors and I now have a bucket full of awesome goblin parts. And, (un)fortunately, since I’ve already committed my own cold hard cash to the art, I am determined not only to use it, but also to see the game through to completion.

Thinking back now I seem to remember that this was my intent (i.e. paying money for art to force myself to continue), but now that the concept has changed it’s feeling very difficult to keep on keepin’ on. I guess I can only trust the shrewdness of my past self at this point as he was devious enough to not trust my present (future) self to continue on will power alone. Wait, what? Anyhow, I hope it’s working…