It Begins Again

Back when I was still a lass in school (yet still a chubby lass as I am today) I got very used to doing all my devlopment on a laptop. The idea of working on a mobile platform was very convient because it fed my desire to NEVER stop working...which my family and friends didn't appreciate. I gave our laptop to Laura when she went to NJ cause she needed it far more then I did. I had switched back to my desktop when I started working since I was really no longer doing programming outside of work.

However, that has changed! I'm now back on laptop but this time a mac book. Lets see how it goes.

Anyhoos...I'm about to begin my first jump into xcode and get a hello world app going. I'll post back here if its succesful.

I'm in a foreign and scary place with this computer. Wish me luck...and send choclate.

Random Map Generation #1

Part of the game design requires randomized map that consists of territories that are made of hexes.

This part of the game is something that I'm finding very intimidating. There are probably a hundred different ways to do it and since we are on the iPhone, we do want the fastest algorithm as well as one that can provide a decent amount of balance. All in all, its seems like a pretty tall order. I figured due to the challenge, I'd be better off working on solutions now while still dabbling in tech development.

So one idea is to pick a random point on the hex map and then randomly pick hexes to fill that will make a territory. Once that is done, randomly pick a edge hex to connect a new territory and start filling it out. In that fashion we should have several territories that are at least touching. However, this does not guarantee that we will have interconnected ones. I'll have to figure that out.

I do know that as I'm building the hex map, I can create just a simple graph of nodes (with each node representing a territory) and basically use the hex map for user selection but use the graph to determine valid neighboring territories.

Indeed. We will see.

Risque'

This is more a personal blog then anything. If you are reading it, good for you but you may not find anything very interesting.

So I set this up to help me track things that were specific to developing IPhone Games, specifically a game with master artist Ryan Ellis.

Starting out, I'm going to be securing a macbook this friday as soon as that happens I'm going to get started on development.

Here is my plan for the "tech" demo:

1. Create a basic hello world application that will start up on the IPhone (or in my case IPod Touch) . Have the application fire up and just show some text on the screen.
2. Do the same application but have it load text from file (preferably xml-format)
   
3. Same application but have it display the text wherever the user touches the screen.
4. Update the application to do both text and an image - have image loaded from file.
5. Use keyboard to take data from user and save that information out to file (again preferably xml)
6. Take the image and text app and update to play an animation
7. Build a math library (vec2d and 3x3 matrix)
   
8. Dynamic Drawing - take a touch and drag event to draw a line from where user click to where user "released"

This should form a "tech" plan that can has specific objectives and hopefully by the time we are done, we should have some basic utility objects that can be used to start getting a prototype of Ryan's game up (this is outside of any issues we face that are game specific).