http://www.itchyinteractive.com

There is also a blog that I keep up to date while developing new products.

Poker Yourself is an Open Feint enabled Texas Hold ‘Em style poker solitaire game for the iPhone.

Featuring online leaderboards, tons of achievements and customization, Poker Yourself will keep you amused for hours.

Features

• Unlock achievement awards using OpenFeint.
• Biggest Banks leaderboard and Historic Highs using OpenFeint.
• Supports portrait and landscape autorotation.
• Compatible with iPhone and iPod Touch.
• Battery friendly.

You can check it out here: http://www.itchyinteractive.com/poker-yourself/

Now I’m “in-between” jobs … I’ve had a few days to put some effort into iPhone development again … and here’s a video of where things stand.

As you can see things have progressed somewhat from the previous installment and it is starting to really look like a playable game. The major new code includes a SkyBox for rendering the backdrop, enemy cubes to shoot at, collision detection to register a hit and also MP3 playback and SFX.

SkyBox

The SkyBox routine is basically as simple as rendering a large cube around the whole scene and applying a texture on the inside. This gives the effect of a nice backdrop whichever way you turn. For the time-being, I’ve used a jpg that I found on t’interwebs that was pre-prepared for use as a SkyBox in CounterStrike.

Collision Detection

There are a total of 10 enemy cubes rendered at any one time. Enemies are randomly scattered in front of you and gradually make there way toward you. If you shoot them, a SFX is played, your score increases by 10 and an explosion routine ensues. Once the explosion is over, the enemy re-spawns randomly somewhere in front of you and again makes it’s way toward you. The explosion routine is basically 10 small cubes which get assigned a random direction vector from the point of impact. These ‘explode’ away for about 100 frames. Well, I think it’s pretty sweet effect! If the enemy gets too close to you a red flash appears on the screen, your score is lowered by 100 and the enemy re-spawns.

The collision detection routine is a basic Bounding Sphere as described here: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1234.asp. As the bullets move pretty fast, I used the advanced version to pick up collisions if say a bullet passes ‘through’ the bounding sphere over two frames.

Sound

For MP3 playback, I used the audio queue service in the Apple AudioKit framework. At the moment, I start my favourite Rob Hubbard C64 ‘Lightforce’ MP3 playing in the game initialization method. The SFX comprise and explosion and a gunshot wavefile I downloaded from www.freesound.org. These are played using the SoundEffect class found in the BubbleLevel SDK example.

Next time …

My next installment should see a variety of enemies with different routines such as weeving about and firing back, a shield to deflect enemy fire, a level system and possibly some kind of terrain (I’m working on a simple heightmap terrain routine but didn’t get it looking satisfactory for this update).

Anyway -- sorry about the hectic sound if you listened to the video on headphones … oh and I gave the game a work-in-progress title of … “Last Stand”  but it seems there’s already an iPod touch game called that … anyone have any other ideas feel free to leave a comment?

Still not really what you might call a ‘game’ but it’s starting to take shape … I think!

I’ve spent the last few weeks busying myself for the move to Brighton in December so not really had a great deal of time to dedicate to iPhone development. What I have done though is to tidy up my source code quite a bit.

Objective-C is quite a bit different to what I’m used to, so I’ve split the code in two. Basically, all interaction with the iPhone is handled by Objective-C which passes off the update/rendering work to the C++/OpenGL game code: The current state of inputs such as accelerometer and touch is sent to the C++ gameUpdate method which updates the game state. The gameDraw routine just handles OpenGL rendering as you would expect.

Hopefully I can get some more work done as soon as possible … For the third installment, I’m planning to get some kind of enemy to shoot at -- which will involve basic collision detection. Part four will probably be taking stock and sketching out a game concept etc.

Here is a quick video of my 1st iPhone app. In terms of functionality, there’s nothing much at the moment -- but the fundamentals are at least in place:

You may recognise my ‘signature’ blue vector grid on a dark blue background … which is basically my starting point for nearly all my OpenGl based projects. The app was written using Apple’s X-Code IDE and uses OpenGl ES to render a 3D grid. I’m adjusting the ‘look-at’ position of the camera using 2 of the 3 accelerometers. The 2D elements comprise a dragable yellow square which in turn updates the x and y values rendered using the Texture2D class.

So it’s nothing much at the moment but hopefully it will develop into a fun 3D iPhone game … I’ll be keeping a blog of developments here on my website.