Sunetos, Inc.

I had a conversation today with a friend that I work with regularly in my day job. We had talked a couple of months ago about an iPhone app idea that we both believed had merit. After our conversation today, I am beginning to think it is the right time to at least build a prototype.

My thought process has been something like this:

• By continuing with my idea, I will keep my focus and steady progress will eventually produce a product I am pleased with. But even with overly optimistic estimates of available time, I will not have something ready for the app store in the next month
• Some of my game ideas could benefit from a few weeks of gestation
• I still have much to learn about OpenGL game development, and what I learn at 360iDev in San Jose will be good leverage in further development
• I am much more comfortable with UIKit development (non-OpenGL), and could produce a workable prototype for the joint idea much more quickly
• My game (so far) is a solo endeavor, the other app would be a joint effort which should help keep me on track
• The scope of the joint idea is narrow enough that we can have something in the app store much sooner than I could on my own

I haven’t lost interest or hope in my game idea, but tonight I will spend my development time playing around with the other idea.

Day T-33 Accomplishments (Tuesday, March 9, 2010)

• Consider options for how to spend my limited iPhone development time

I got fixated on a particular calculation Monday evening, and ended up spending too much time figuring out something that I most likely will not use. By the end of my session on Monday it was working, but I should have bypassed the issue until I was sure I needed to finish it.

Day T-35 to T-34 Accomplishments (Sunday-Monday, March 7-8, 2010)

• Finished a task that probably did not need to be finished

The first week of March was spring break for my college son, so we spent time at family in Florida, then Alabama (both were a little cooler than normal.) He had been hard at work sketching and thinking about his game idea during the break, and during the last part of the week, I got to help by building a prototype for him to try various combinations of game gestures and timings. It was fun working together on it, and well worth the diversion of my iphone dev time.

Day T-38 to T-36 Accomplishments (Thursday-Saturday, March 4-6, 2010)

• Spent time with my son on his game idea
• Developed a simple prototype to test gestures for his idea

I narrowed down my memory problem to an extra release of a custom property, but it took me too long to find it. It is a little frustrating that my Objective-C debugging skills feel so far behind those I have in the Java world.

I tried several different methods of tracking down the extra release, but the simplest method proved effective–double checking every possible reference to the property by visual inspection. I need to find better methods for this sort of thing, but for now I am back on track.

Day T-39 Accomplishments (Wednesday, March 3, 2010)

• Found the double release error causing me grief

I didn’t spend much time on iPhone on Tuesday.

Day T-40 Accomplishments (Tuesday, March 2, 2010)

• Not much

I so dearly love memory management problems — they are always so easy to find and fix…sure. I had a couple of hours of focused time this evening for development work, but unfortunately wasted the last half trying to find a memory allocation bug.

In some recent refactoring I introduced a double release somehow, but after an hour of late evening head banging, I could not find it and decided the wisest course of action was to drop it for the evening — hopefully I will find and fix the issue within the first little bit of my next session. I believe I at least know when I introduced the bug, so hopefully this will be another demonstration of “version control software is my friend”.

Day T-41 Accomplishments (Monday, March 1, 2010)

• Remembered there is a point where it’s best to just put down the keyboard and walk away

I did no coding on Sunday, but did get comfortable on the couch with a couple of development books:

• iPhone Game Development, Zirkle & Hogue
• Mobile 3D Graphics with OpenGL ES and M3G, Pulli, etal

Day T-42 Accomplishments (Sunday, February 28, 2010)

• Spent a couple of hours with some iPhone development books

I had to choose one of two goals for today: better material handling, or better movement processing. In thinking through what each meant, I realized that the better material handling is really dependent on smarter movement processing so I dove in. We are almost to my brother’s house, but I finished the core refactoring that should provide more efficient handling of movement, better coverage that will support the material handling better, and simplification of several classes.

Day T-43 Accomplishments (Saturday, February 27, 2010)

• Simplified movement handling
• Provided good basis for material handling improvements

I am heading out of town on a two week trip, visiting family in Florida for a week, then on to Alabama to help my daughter and her husband move to a new house. I have enough work commitments that I’ll probably try to get in 60-70% of my normal consulting work hours, but I also hope to elicit some good feedback on my app (and continue making progress!). It is far enough along that I can explain where I am going, have folks try it, make some changes, etc. It will also be a sanity check on what they think the “fun” factor is.

A key part of the game involves digging with tools of different shapes and sizes. I want the tool face (width of a shovel, bucket, etc.) to rotate to be perpendicular to the current direction of the touch movement, and tonight I got that behavior working correctly. As you move around, the screen is updated as I expected.

Next on my list of things to accomplish is a more realistic movement of material. Currently, the tool picks up material along the path of movement, but without limits–a shovel with infinite capacity. I have placeholders for capacity and some reasonable ideas of how to handle it–perhaps tomorrow.

Day T-44 Accomplishments (Friday, February 26, 2010)

• Finished tool rotation code, it now correctly stays perpendicular to direction of motion

I didn’t spend a lot of time evaluating things at the mid-point — my natural tendency is to over analyze, so I’m going to give it a quick check:

• Progress is not as fast as I had hoped, but I *am* making progress
• I over-estimated my available time, but I have not been that far off the mark overall–I just need to be disciplined with the time I have
• I do not know if I will have my app in the store before 360iDev, but I’m not discouraged–it will be done when it’s done
• I over-reached a bit early on, but I think I’m doing a reasonable job of keeping over-analysis and feature-creep at bay

My project is a game that involves digging motions where you push material around with touches. Today I modified my tool handling to start taking into account the direction of the movement. I added code for rotations as well as decent unit tests, but still have some odd behavior with the gestures–fixing that behavior will have to wait until Friday.

Day T-45 Accomplishments (Thursday, February 25, 2010)

• Added tool rotation code to gesture handling