During the last month, I have been developing a game for the iPhone, so this post is going to be a recap of this last hectic month, and not so much on the actual game and gameplay, more on that later.
Since I quit school in early June, my goal for the summer was to create a complete title for the iPhone. Whole June was scheduled for personal time, so it went all to July until I started to develop.
Before this project was actually started I went through a lot of other areas. I was first trying to develop a game without an idea, just dealing with technical aspects and hoping for an idea to pop up. Well, that never happened, but I got some nice code that I later could reuse with some minor modifications. For you game programmers, this is a common problem that you probably have read of: "Don't make an engine, make a game!".

After realizing that an idea for a game wasn't just going to drop from the sky right in front of my feet, I decided to look up some game design resources. We did some game design at the institute, but much to little. So I found this guide on how to go about designing a game, and it was PURE GOLD! After I had started to go through that material, I was thinking about just doing a remake of a game that I loved when I was a kid. I watched some videos of it on YouTube an thought: "That's not THAT cool as I remembered". But I still wanted to go with that game concept, so I stuck with it. Then I went through the crash course in game design, and the ideas just came flying once I started to type my design document and it turned out not be a remake at all, it's a completely different game. Very fun experience!

Two days later, I started coding. It was going very fast in the beginning, after just a couple of days I was flying over randomly generated terrain and shooting at an enemy, and the game was basically done, I thought! Then all the details that was going to be implemented started to appear, together with glitches and bugs. And that eats up a lot of time! I also had art to create, which was a LONG time ago I even touched, maybe some time before my days in Blekinge. Surprisingly, I got satisfactional results pretty quickly, considering. And then my baby brother, who is starting to become a music freak, created some music for the game together with my input.

Then the last two (!) weeks have mostly been polishing and making it a complete game, with menus, high score, advancing through the levels and some rough balancing. We'll see if it passes Apple's review or if it missed something and will bounce back once or twice.