Tiny Frog Software

Update on Attack of the Meeplings for iPhone

Last time I made a blog entry I posted that I wanted to have AOTM for iPhone done by March 31st – Well that was a little over two months ago so that deadline flew by.

It *is* coming – It’s taken a bit longer than I had hoped. I really can’t get used to OSX and Xcode – Although Objective-C has been getting easier for me and it’s a nice little language, if only Xcode was more like Visual Studio with it’s great intellisense support.

The biggest issue I have found with iPhone game programming is the MASSIVE difference in performance between the iPhone simulator and the actual device – The simulator is actually just an x86 version running on your Mac within a nice looking iPhone chrome. But the actual device is alot less powerfull than a full desktop PC. Don’t get me wrong it’s still pretty powerful – So long as you program it the way it is intended to be programmed. Desktop PCs are so powerful that we often do things in an inefficent way because, well hey – It runs fine on most modern computers. On a mobile device you have to actually start thinking about performance – Which I actually kind of enjoy, unfortunately alot of my time is spent on getting the game to perform well and less on putting the actual game togeather.

But like I said, it is coming along – There is one fully playable level (on normal difficulty with a boss) and I’ve got a couple of in-game menu screens, I’ve shown it to a few people and the reception so far has been pretty positive.

Should I make another guess as to when it’s going to be done? Ok, how about in another three months time? August 31st perhaps?

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