I did this last year, and it might be fun to review what I wrote… So let’s see, I ended last year’s post with this
So, by this time next year I’ll be happy if I’ve created at least one complete game of some description. I don’t even care if it’s just Pong with a computer opponent you can’t beat. Let’s set the bar nice and low to start with.
And if you go over to iTunes you’ll see I did indeed manage to create a game called Ship Goes Up 
It took me a number of months and was somewhat fiddly. Some people that bought it even commented that it was quite fun to play. I think that constitutes success. I also managed to help out a friend with an Android game called Retro Blitz that he’d wanted to put on the App Store (it was created using some cross-platform tool so converting it to an iOS app was as difficult as compiling the supplied XCode project, tarring it with the App Store glue and waiting for Apple to do their thing).
In other news I received a BBC Micro for Christmas along with a Fignition AVR-based computer. The BBC Micro needs me to buy an SD card reader for it, and the Fignition needs me to learn Forth. I have ideas to type out some of the simple “games” from several 80s computer books that I own. It might make a nice diversion from the other thing I spent this year doing…
If you’ve read this blog recently you’ll have seen several videos of me slowly getting to grips with ‘Real’ OpenGL ES 2.0. Real, full-fat OpenGL ES, complete with me having to learn basic linear algebra and other highly confusing concepts. All I can say is that learning something confusing like what a ‘ModelViewMatrix’ is takes more than an afternoon of playing in OpenGL. Learning all this stuff seemed to follow the pattern of me reading a book or blog entry about it, getting confused, reading several others, asking some questions, fiddling around for a week or so, then re-reading the books and blogs while thinking “oh right, that now makes sense!”. I can’t learn the stuff without reading the books first, and I can’t make sense of the books without fiddling with the examples.
Go and learn proper 3D maths now, it’s really hard
So, in the name of progress I want to achieve two things next year
- Make a fun 3D game that people play for more than 30 seconds
- Have it sell more than 10 copies
so that it’s worth me renewing my iOS dev license in August. I mean, £59 isn’t so bad – it’s more fun than spending the equivalent on an XBox Live Gold account or shovelling money into WoW or Rift (and I can’t play those games anyway, I don’t see a level 50 warrior elf running through the forest, I see a scenegraph apply matrix transformations to a 3D mesh while the entire world is translated down the Z axis).
