[$0.99] Headcase Games launches iFist!

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[$0.99] Headcase Games launches iFist!

(6 posts) (3 voices)

Started 2 years ago by woebtz
Latest reply from Steve Oldmeadow

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woebtz
Member
Hey everyone,

I'm proud to announce that Headcase Games has just released iFist for iPhone and iPod Touch to the App Store. This is our first app on the store and our first game using the Cocos2d framework.

iFist is a rhythm and memory survival challenge game that takes its inspiration from Rock Paper Scissors and the electronic game Simon. The rules of the game are simple. Memorize the sequence of RPS throws and then recall the opposing gestures before time runs out. You're scored on accuracy and speed, and each round gets progressively more difficult as the game goes on.

iFist 1.0 features:
- Fun and engaging pick up and play gameplay,
- Sequence, Challenge, and Expert game modes,
- Local and global high score rankings,
- Colorful graphics and lively sound effects.
Screenshots:

YouTube:

Get the Flash Video

Website:
http://www.ifist-game.com

iTunes (Affiliate Link):
http://bit.ly/ifistcocos2d

If you're a fan of games that test your concentration and reaction time, I think you'll really enjoy playing iFist.

Thanks for your support!

Ben

P.S. Please let us know how you like it by reviewing the game or by posting a comment below.

-----
Headcase Games is Ben and Ron - expats from the console game industry and developers on the Tony Hawk series, Alpha Protocol, Neverwinter Nights 2, Knights of the Old Republic 2, Heroes of Might and Magic IV, and Caesar III.
Posted 2 years ago #
woebtz
Member

Hello again,

Thank you everyone for this incredible community. It's been a longtime dream of mine to develop a mobile game. Without Cocos2d and the collective expertise of you all, I would never have this opportunity to realize my dream so quickly.

Ron and I started designing iFist a little over 3 months ago. We threw around a number of ideas, but ultimately decided to run with a proof of concept that I'd been toying with. Over the course of 2 months and a number of lunch meetings, we completed iFist 1.0 and I think we're both very satisfied with how it turned out.

iFist began as a Cocos2d 0.7.2 project, but we wanted to keep up with the framework, so I followed Emil's template for statically linking Cocos2d and this greatly eased the upgrade process. iFist 1.0 was finally built with 0.8.0-beta (r1114) to take advantage of CocosDenshion and SimpleAudioEngine. We use CocosLive to manage our global high scores and Flurry Analytics SDK 1.2 to capture user statistics.

For our particular style of game (survival challenge), I wrote a generic RuleSet class that was used to model each game mode. Each mode was then represented as a collection of variables that controlled the behavior of the game (extra lives, round length, sequence randomization, points, match type, etc.). This made testing different game modes and variations very fast!

For talking between the layers and scenes, we used a game data singleton that managed the selected mode, settings, score functions and reading/writing to the user defaults. This was immensely easier than writing custom -init methods or exposing properties in scenes as my early prototype did.

Our graphics, including the menu buttons, fit on a single 1024x1024 atlas PNG that we created in Photoshop. This sheet along with the sound assets were preloaded during the application start up. This increased the total loading time (~7s on iPhone 3G), but eliminated most of the load in the rest of the game. I want to develop a better solution for managing our assets in the future (multiple smaller atlases?).

Lastly, we tested our code with Instruments and Clang/LLVM. Instruments is still tricky to use, but Clang was a cinch to setup following these instructions:
Find Bugs with Clang Static Analyzer

iFist 1.0 was submitted on July 20 with 2 new users reported (by Flurry) on July 24 and approved for sale on August 3, 2009 (14 days)!

In closing, I just want to say that this is the first open source community that I've tried to integrate myself into and it's my hope that I can give back as much as you've given me. It's a really amazing experience to be apart of Cocos2d.

Thank you!

woebtz

P.S. Matt Gallagher has a great article about singletons and global variables:
Singletons, AppDelegates and top-level data.

Posted 2 years ago #
PhilM
Member

Nice post, thanks for all the details.

Just wondered when using Flurry or other tracking software, if Apple requires you to notify the user that your going online? Or does it happen behind the scenes, or perhaps your only using it if they submit their scores online?

Looks nicely done, I'll try and check it out shortly. Congrats ; )

Posted 2 years ago #
Steve Oldmeadow
Administrator

Is the name intentionally or unintentionally hilarious? Should be very popular with certain communities ;)

Posted 2 years ago #
woebtz
Member

Thanks for the kind words!

@Phil: User consent seems to be required before sending non-anonymous data or using an abnormal amount of bandwidth. I don't know where or how this is stated by Apple, but it may be an online-privacy issue in the EULA.

I did hear stories of other apps being rejected for collecting data, so I chose the non-Location version of Flurry. The documentation explained that it only "phoned home" at the application's startup, logging anonymous usage stats that would be uploaded at the next application's startup and never exceeding 1KB of data. I figured the CocosLive notice was the most important since it collected data specifically for the purpose of publication on the leaderboard.

@Steve: Hehehe. I suppose it was intentionally named and unintentionally great for bit.ly links; I'm sending my address book -- http://bit.ly/ifistfriends

Posted 2 years ago #
Steve Oldmeadow
Administrator

http://bit.ly/ifistfriends LOL. You've taken over from Stroke Ball as best cocos2d game name!

Posted 2 years ago #

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