A few late night ramblings to make up for the fact that I haven't blogged in over a week

Ok, forget Zombie Farm.  That was a fun little distraction, but now I'm over it.

So, the good thing about this project is that it is incredibly challenging, and I'm learning a ton of stuff about computers and programs and just generally how stuff works.  Although, I do have this disturbing thought that I'm the guy trying to teach himself how internal combustion engines work 30 years after the industrial revolution was in full swing.  Oh well - I didn't start this project to revolutionize the world (I'll try to do that in some future project, I promise).

For now, I'm just trying to make an iPhone / iPad app... and right now it's not going so great.  Since I last blogged, I finished the iOS Game Development book (finally!) that I've referenced in earlier posts - the one I started reading at the very beginning of this project.  It's a pretty bad book, full of obvious errors, and seemingly deliberate obfuscation.  And based on the one other title I've read by that same publisher (Addison-Wesley), I plan to avoid picking up future books with that name on them.  The Apress books I read, however, were great - if you're thinking about learning programming-related stuff, I recommend Apress books for sure.  If only they had a good book specifically on game development... but I think I'm past that now.

Although poorly done, the iOS Game Development book did lay out a pretty robust game engine, and I'll be able to use a lot of that info on future projects.  But for now, I think the way ahead is to bone up on Sparrow (the lightweight game engine that I'll use to try to bang out some sample apps), and, well... try to bang out some sample apps.

Which brings me to tonight.  I spent about 3 hours tonight trying to get through part 1 of the iKy1e tutorial I mentioned earlier, only to find out that there are a ton of issues with integrating OpenFeint, which is sort of like a social networking extension for games on the iPhone - online leader boards, featured game-of-the-day type promotions, "friends," achievements... that sort of thing.  After I finally fixed all of the errors and warnings and was able to successfully load the first part of the tutorial app onto my iPhone simulator, it opened, didn't do what it was supposed to, and then crashed.  So I'm giving up on it for now.  I would have dropped it sooner, except for this statement in iKy1e's tutorial:

"We had over 520,000 downloads in the first 2 days our game was promoted by Free Game of the Day. We immediately jumped to #1 in the Top Free chart and stayed there for 6 days."

So, pain in the arse?  Yeah.  Worth it?  We'll see.

I'm going to call it a night for now.  Tomorrow, I may spend a few hours trying to follow OpenFeint's directions for setting up an app with their service integrated into it.  If it works, great.  If not, I'm moving on for now.  I've got much more fundamental things to work on at the moment, and I can always come back to promotional stuff later.

Oh yeah.  I started this post with "the good thing about this project..." so I should probably finish that thought.  The bad thing about this project is that sometimes it feels like work.  But most things worth doing feel like work at some point along the way.

So here's hoping this is worth doing.