So, I could only find one crappy dice roller out there even reasonably good for the iPhone (I bought a 4GB phone on Friday, should receive it on Tues!) so I decided to write my own:
http://www.hotcat.org/dice
I plan on “monetizing” it (golly do I hate that word) and other JavaScript games/apps I plan on developing for the phone. While it’s mostly a hobby, and I don’t ever plan on charging $ for what I write (too much incentive to rip the JavaScript off) but making a bit of ad money seems reasonable to me.
As with my PPC phone, games for the iPhone are few, far between, poorly designed/written, costly, and generally rip-offs of each other. (FYI, the PPC is likely to be sold soon. About the only app I can’t do on the iPhone is my GPS turn-by-turn software; perhaps I’ll trade the phone for a regular PPC or something.)
I need to continue developing improvements to the interface. Although, so far, I’m very happy with the simplicity–no input boxes, form fields, or any of that crap. I need to capture when the phone is turned sideways to properly change the orientation. I am considering adding sound or some sort of animation to the dice rolling (beyond the “show random numbers and shift the dice a bit.) Collision detection on the dice might be good, but is an O(n^2) problem so I’m not hot on that today, particularly as I’d want to have the user be unable to overlap two dice which either requires preventing them from moving the “dragged” die on top of others or moving the other dice which can get out of hand.
Anyone else interested in working on games for the iPhone? I’m debating between:
- a physics-based game (ala Worms, Gravitar, or somesuch; something with spring physics would be really cool)
- an arcade game (Asteroids, Galaxian, etc.)
- an adventure game (actually, I wonder how hard it would be to port ScummVM or something similar; although a simplified point-and-click adventure would be better and I am sure someone is porting ScummVM now)
- a deduction puzzle game (e.g. Sudoku or Sherlock [a better deduction puzzle game])
- a nonogram game would be nice, a-la Picross DS, although I generally have my DS with me when I’m traveling so I can stick with Picross, myself (best $20 game out there!)
- an RPG, particularly with a real time twist to the combat (a-la Mario & Luigi)
- something multi-player using AJAX, either real-time or stored for later
Many of these require significant amounts of artwork, which I am not good at producing by any means. Photographing dice took me all morning and multiple tries that failed (I need to get something better at “chroma-keying” so I can take out the background and generate transparent PNG’s.)
Other tools I plan on writing:
- a countdown timer – I use one on my PPC for brewing my tea; a little complex in that I brew my tea “gong fu” style which requires a variety of different brew times depending on how many times the pot has been brewed before
- a decent photo gallery viewer – all of my photos are accessible via the web but the gallery format is crap (and the free PHP-based galleries are crap, too), something AJAX that only transmits image data at the resolution visible to the phone would be keen, if possible
The built in timer is nice on the phone, but it lacks something critical: second resolution. For brewing “gongfu-style” tea, timing is a matter of seconds. Here’s my first try, I wish it were an audible alarm and I wish the inputs popped up the number pad not the regular keyboard, but perhaps there is something in Apple’s developer docs that will help. I may need to make a full-fledged app instead, but that’ll probably be later.
Sister was up for the weekend; to pick up my second Doctor Who pinball machine and to celebrate her b-day, and to get away from her crappy work situation.
Akin to 3-d printers, Dustin applies thin layers of rosin and paints each layer with acrylics…Very cool fake lucite plant style work, plus some neat-o abstracts.