The haphazard plan...

I've got games coming out of my ears, but absolutely nothing to show for it.

Here's how things are, currently.

1. Arcade Slots : Still where I left it.
2. The Framework : Slightly ahead of where I left it. I've recently added my super-duper wordlist into the engine. Info below.
3. Stringy Things : Word Engine helps, but trying to formulate ways to make it chunky, without losing the complexity of the DS edition.
4. Puzzobomb : Considering that I'm going to have to make levels for this! Argh! Sprites drawn
5. Maze thing : Not entirely formulated yet, might offshoot into about 3 different games at this rate!



#1 relies on me figuring out what other games are going into it.
Arcade Slots is a nice game to build, but I remember getting to this point doing the DS one. Except, back then, I had the whole of Arcade-History to play with. Now I only have my own 200+ archive, and I'm finding it hard to think of games that fit the bill.
Bah.

All the rest of the games expect the framework to be complete first. I'm about 60%'ish through that, currently in the "Oh no, there's another thing I've not added yet!" stage of thinking, but it's slowly getting better.


Now, as for Stringy Things.. That needed a wordlist, so obviously that was going to need to be part of the Framework.
Simple thinking works best, so out came the DS edition of Stringy Things.
Luckily, that was done in C, so I literally was able to copy+paste the thing from the DS code to the new iPhing code.
Well, I say Copy+Paste, I also needed to tweak it from using C-Strings, to NSStrings, and then faff about with all manner of other little bits and pieces inbetween.

It's nice and fast.
And when I say "Nice and Fast", I mean about .5 seconds to find "Z?????" on a 2Gen iPod.
EA's badly coded Scrabble is much much quicker, but has a minute long loader bar that annoys the crap out of me. It makes it much harder to "Quick load, quick play, quick quit" that game, but also EA's done it all in "As nice as we can make it" mode, so that soaks up the battery as if your iPhing's on fire..
Your choices? Leave the game running and kill the battery, or keep quitting/reloading the game ... and kill the battery whilst waiting between plays for it to load.
gah!

I'm hoping that Stringy Things won't end up as badly as that.

As with Cardagain and Arcade Slots, I'll be using plain and simple UIViews to do everything. The iPhings are prepared for those, they expect those, and the can fling 'em around without too much of a resulting battery drain.
Load up Cardagain and leave it running, if you don't believe me.

So, with all this going on, I've plenty to do. Lots of little bits and pieces to cram together.
It's been a long long road, but there should hopefully be a visible result soon.

..
Just not this week!