Ok, so Im working on an iPhone/Touch application, and Im finding it rather fun and exciting, to an extent.  I went through a lot of ideas of what my first iPhone application will be, and changed my mind about 4 times as I obviously have some great stuff to ‘port’ and have had some good ideas for other games and applications rolling around in my head. But I decided to go with a port of one of my simpler games right off the bat. Why? Well for one it is simple and will get me to the market quicker I hope(Im shooting for a 3 week turnaround having started basically last weekend). Im very curious as to what the process is like and what type of sales even a lower end game should expect? 2, it will give me a project to work off of for other projects as games tend to follow similiar formats with like a title screen, help screen, settings screen etc….(it might have something to do with cards as I might have a lot of card game code lying around, so some of the graphics may be re-usable too depending on their reception).

 A lot of what Ive done so far is to study examples and read up on the Cocoa and Objective-C stuff. Its great to see that I may be able to re-use some of my C++ classes.  And then Ive done a lot of graphics work. I have about 90% of the graphics done(and created them all pretty much from scratch). And I have to say that while I’m not great, I sure am about 10 times better than I was the last time I released one of my games… Ill show you a taste once I get a little closer… 

And Im waiting for my Enrollment to get processed for Apple. I would expect they will contact me and charge me the $99 and I’ll be able to post to the store, and more importanly test on my iPod Touch, but… Im not even sure how that process goes or how long it takes… That might be my biggest hold up to market.

But its great, a lot of people have taken up iPhone Development including some VERY talented people that I worked with in the past, so I’m getting pointers from them and then on forums and the documentation and its got me excited to see how my first game turns out and even what they are doing…  

  The whole thing is obviously still kind of a buzz because of the early market thing, much like I used to feel in about 2000 messing with Pocket PC. Its rather fun, and though I stand by everything Ive wondered about the ecosystem, it is interesting that this many big game houses are putting development towards it… Though it sort of looks like some of them are already adopting the “this is a paid demo for our actual desktop/console application” type deal. Oh, and the ad based programs are a new interesting twist…

So it appears that the smaller guys will still be the ones responsible for the best stuff on this platform… Fun!

(Don’t worry, part of the reason I also chose this ‘short’ project, is because Im committed to doing the big updates on our existing WM products.)