Hi all
My first game hit the App Store late last night. I'll cut straight to the chase...
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iTunes: Block Depot: bit.ly/8oKv9O
Homepage: http://www.geekery-industries.com/blockdepot
And 5 Promo codes (I wish i could give out more, but the rest are accounted for)
AKP77MHKXKLA
H7K4LHRKWJAR
6HFTW7X734P7
YJLAYTKMHF7M
MXATH3AWXLHR
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<b>A little bit about the game</b>
I had the idea for Block Depot about 14 years ago, when I worked in a warehouse for a now bankrupt UK furniture company (MFI). While moving heavy boxes around, and trying to put away too much stock with a raging hangover, I thought to myself, "There's a game in this."
14 years later and I finally got round to using the iPhone SDK, stumbled upon Cocos2d, and here it is.
This is not only my first ever game, but also my first Objective-C project, and my first application on an actual platform. I'm actually an out of work web designer.
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<b>Developer Stuff:</b>
As I said, this is my first iPhone App, so I'd like to share my experiences with the rest of you, especially the noobs.
Many many many thanks to all the people behind Cocos2d, everyone on these forums and over at Stack Overflow. To say this game wouldn't have happened without Cocos2d and it's supportive community is not an exaggeration, it's an absolute fact.
The design and development time for Block Depot was about 4 weeks. I'd been tinkering with the iPhone SDK for about a month prior to that, and learning Objective C and Cocos2d at the same time. I'd say, for anyone coming to iPhone development from the web, give yourself about two months to get competent, but be sure to set yourself a proper project to give yourself something to aim for.
Integrating Openfeint was a doddle and took about 30 minutes. Although, I would suggest creating an OpenFeintHandler class, especially if you're a beginner, as it will prevent you having to change any classes that use OpenFeint to .mm files. I will eventually share mine, but it's a bit of a mess right now and needs some re-factoring.
The number 1 lesson learnt during development: DO NOT INCLUDE HEADER FILES IN HEADER FILES. If you're subclassing something, then that's the only header you add to your header. Everything else get's included in the .m file, above the inclusion of your actual header file.
<b>The Approval Process</b> was quick. I hear it's different for everyone, but I submitted Block Depot on a Friday, it went into review at Apple on Monday and was in the App Store by early tuesday morning (UK time).
I'm working on a couple of updates now for some new features.... and some bug fixes. The iTunes Connect portal closes down for tomorrow (23rd of December) which meant I had to rush it through in order to beat my own personal deadline of having an App out before 2010. New features in the pipeline are
Time Trials: Everything Must Go
Puzzles
Squash The Rat
Lite Version
I'll post more about those when they're released.
I also need to clean it up around the edges here and there.
Anyway, anyone who plays it, I'd love to get some feedback. You can be as brutal as you like, as long as it's constructive. I'll keep you all posted on updates.
