Seems this past week I’ve been slammed with a ton of stuff. Had to take a breather, step back and get a bit more organized to gain some perspective. Tax season is in full swing, so that’s always biting at my ankles as this is my first year filing as a self-employed tax payer. Tilt to Live Viva la Coop is close to being live on the app store (hopefully), and HD will be followed up shortly after. In the meantime, I’m tasked with starting a brand new project, and it’s an exciting one indeed. The biggest hurdle so far is trying to mitigate the second-system effect. With all the problems encountered developing Tilt to Live, I want to try to get rid as many of them as possible the 2nd go around. Yet, trying to eliminate all of them doesn’t seem like a wise choice because even though there were a few ‘snags’ in developing TTL, they weren’t big enough problems that would justify going out of my way writing custom tools, scripts, or whatever to relieve them.
One of the bigger problems (or a possible non-problem depending on where we go in the future) was the realization of how locked into the app store and iOS system we were. Tilt to Live and it’s HD counterpart were pretty much written in pure Objective-C. Very little constructs of C or C++ were used. There were only a handful of structs for networking, and vector functions, but that was about it. When faced with the decision of wanting to try out the game on different platforms, it was a non-starter as all the gameplay code would have to be rewritten in C or C++ (of course Android is a beast on it’s own using Java). It wasn’t a problem at the time because we were focused on simply trying to succeed in the quickest and easiest way possible. But looking forward, I’d like to have the option to go to another platform without the pain of starting from scratch.
GDC is looming around the corner, and it’s really exciting to think after so many years of following GDC in the news I’ll finally be going to this awesome event not as just a spectator, but as a game developer. Exciting times indeed.