Tonight marks the end of the first week of Postal Worker development. The “Hello Kranzky” application runs on my iPhone, and allows up to five Captain Onion sprites to be moved around with multitouch. There were a few wrinkles getting the assets built and bundled, but everything is now under control, and I’m comfortable with the APIs.
What I need now is a game engine. In the last couple of blog posts, I’ve been sketching out how the game will flow, and I need to get that into code. Splash screen to main menu to game to high score and so forth – each of these contexts needs to be represented in code and hooked together, and I prefer to get all of that scaffolding in place before working on the game proper (for several reasons; it’s harder to take a complete game and introduce all of those different game states, and it’s nice to begin with a generic game state management system that can be re-used in future projects).
I estimate that the next ten posts (06 to 15) will all concern the development of an iPhone version of the “Kranzky Engine”. Apart from game state management, I’ll need entities (that is, game objects), together with a manager for those, I’ll need to abstract away the controls, I’ll need some kind of menu system, a physics engine, an animation system, audio system, Twitter integration, online high scores and so forth. All of these can be represented to some degree of detail in isolation from the game proper. Not the most fun job in the world, but it’ll make development of PW all the easier.
Physics will be especially challenging, as AirPlay doesn’t include any out of the box, so I’ll need to investigate getting Box2D building. Should be possible. Funtimes!
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