I haven’t yet elaborated a complete concept of where I want to take Yuckfu visually, but after I did some quick sketches yesterday I decided against 2D graphics for obvious reasons. So, the background, the crates and the character will be drawn in 3D – that is with Polygons and stuff. I won’t change the gameplay with this – you will still see the whole scene from a fixed side view.
Why not 2D graphics then? Simple: if I’d be the one doing them, they won’t look good. I feel more comfortable with doing 3D stuff. My experience with real modeling software however is at a bare minimum. So here’s another thing to learn.
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More than 4 years ago I released my first and (to this date) only game – Yuckfu – to the public. The game’s concept and controls are ridiculously simple and can be grasped in a matter of seconds, but it takes hours to become good at it. The graphic sucks and there’s no audio at all – the gameplay however still feels as fresh as is felt years ago. It still is fun to play despite of all it’s shortcomings.
Why am I telling you this? Well, I have been playing with the idea to redo this game for the iPhone for quite some time now. The iPhone’s capabilities and input methods seem like a perfect fit for it. And with the App Store I might even make a buck with this.
A few days ago I finally downloaded the SDK and tried to get familiar with it. Now that I’m 79€ poorer and actually able to test my desired input method for this game (the iPhone’s accelerometer), I can safely say that it will be a lot of fun – not only to play, but also to develop!
I’m not planning to simply port the crappy graphics over to the iPhone, but to rewrite and re-design the whole game – and to kick myself in the ass a bit while I do so, I decided to blog about the process. Sadly, because of certain circumstances, I’m not able to talk about the iPhone’s SDK too much, so I will try to focus on design and general programming aspects instead.
Since I’m new to Objective-C and OSX programming this will be quite an “interesting” journey. I hope you join me!
You can already read in numerous articles why code signing sucks, so let me just join the choir. The main reasons mentioned are lack freedom and overall complication – and it was indeed easier and free to get your iPhone application up and running on a jailbroke iPhone, than it is now with the SDK. I have gone through all the hassle of code signing yesterday, just to be able to test an application on actual hardware.
While other companies (Microsoft, Sun…) are opening up more and more, Apple denies itself from this movement and makes things more complicated for all of us. A very sad decision, and also one they can’t and won’t revert.
Update: Also, Fucking NDA.
I haven’t yet elaborated a complete concept of where I want to take Yuckfu visually, but after I did some quick sketches yesterday I decided against 2D graphics for obvious reasons. So, the background, the crates and the character will be drawn in 3D – that is with Polygons and stuff. I won’t change the gameplay with this – you will still see the whole scene from a fixed side view.