Well, Ive now tried the ‘spend 2-3 months on a game and add polish to it experiment’ for iPhone. So now for something completely different. I am writing a game (using a lot of existing code) in just THREE days that I will put up on the AppStore. I invite you to follow along as I write it. Basically I came up with the idea last night, and I thought, hmmm…. I really like this idea for a simple variation on the gem swapping/Match 3 type genre, I should make it quick.

Some of my thoughts: 

Some of the games on the AppStore that are making insane amounts of money are VERY SIMPLE games. Stupidly simple in many cases. So what the heck.

Im not going to stop much to really tweak it this first go round. Why? Well because I dont want more than 3 days invested in it. I can put out a pretty good product by just moving ahead, and by looking at some of the games that are the most popular that have way more polished games they compete against, well Im not sure the iPhone market really appreciates the details like they should. So why bother. And then Ill only have 3 days of development invested in it instead of 2 weeks… So if it doesnt sell it doesnt sell, I almost left the market completely because my polished ‘Jezster’ didnt sell with 2 months behind it! But 3 days, well it is worth a shot…

I figured since I already have code that will handle about 80% of what this game will do thanks to Poker Stacks (and a little Jezster for some eye candy)…  

 I already have 95% of the graphics done in about 3 hours today, and the shell of the game working and showing the title screen and gameboard, so its a fun little experiment that who knows, might be the next big iPhone game.

 And as a little bonus experiment, I had a different name picked out, but my brother happened to mention that I should have the word ‘Ninja’ in the title. It doesnt matter whether the game has anything at all to do with Ninjas, people just like ninjas!! So ‘Gem Ninja’ it is…

 So follow along the next 3 days as I crank this sucker out. I wont give away the 1 gameplay mechanic that makes it different(though Im not guaranteeing completely different from everything out there, but its an original idea to me, so…). It should be fun….

Hoping to get the gem board drawing and the high score system in place by the end of the day…