Our Games Live on the iPod

Once again thanks to Lion, who, when he's not being the business manager by getting us registered and licensed and providing funding for these efforts, wears the "assistant developer" hat by laying all the groundwork for porting our game onto the iPhone/iPod.

He's made excellent progress on this front. He's successfully duplicated all the critical functionality of the game in the iPhone environment, and now that we have a license with Apple, he's even started moving our apps onto his iPod Touch. It's pretty awesome seeing the things that we've programmed working on the iPod. I may be developing our launch game (not counting TicTacAwe) single-handedly, but there's no doubt that Lion's efforts are just as critical as mine -- and I'm really glad I only have to take a small part in the business aspects, and can leave figuring out how to get everything working in Macworld in his hands. The fact that he does all this while juggling a full-time job and a family, whereas I have nothing else to distract me, makes it even more impressive.

The only setback right now is that Sorceror's Stripes apparently runs like a gimpy snail on the iPod at the moment. But there are games with more advanced graphics than ours that run beautifully on the iPod, so apparently there's just a flaw in the port at the moment. Since Lion's gotten everything working so well so far, I have every confidence in his ability to overcome this speed issue. Still, I'll feel relieved when it's running at full power. I get stressed while critical problems in my apps remain unresolved.

What would really suck is if Quartz (the graphics library we're using because it's so easy to use) is too slow to handle the game and we need to switch to OpenGL to take full advantage of whatever graphics accelerating hardware there is in that little device. That would suck because OpenGL is a b!7ch to use, so I'm hoping Lion will be able to get it running fast while still using Quartz for our graphics API.

All this drives home that I really wish I had the funding to buy myself a low-end Mac just so I can code our next game directly in the environment it'll be deployed to, thereby bypassing most of these twitchy porting issues.

As for me, I'm almost done with story mode for Sorceror's Stripes. I will most likely have it finished tomorrow. Closer and closer...

- Satellite Observatory (James)