I have recently been following a monster 7 part tutorial: How To Make a Simple Playing Card Game with Multiplayer and Bluetooth. It deals a lot with GameKit and is a great insight into how to use networking within an app. The tutorial uses the old style nibs rather than the newly promoted Storyboard approach for designing the User Interface. After finishing this tutorial I have tried implementing a lot of the same functionality into my own app.

This has caused a lot of trouble as the I am using the new Story boarding approach which involves these things called "Segue's". They are basically a link between two scenes in the storyboard, that you can add via the user interface. Trying to implement these things pragmatically has been a bit of a nightmare but I'm hoping in the long run it will make my life easier. 

I finally got the majority of the networking stuff down and I am currently re-designing some of the game classes to ensure they are using the proper MVC ( Model, View, Controller ) pattern and also delegates.

Hopefully this will all start to pick up a little as I am becoming pretty fluent with ObjectiveC and the Interface Builder is starting to make sense (or I am just becoming as equally mental as the Interface Builder).

Cheers :)  

It's been a while since I have done a blog post, mostly because I've been playing around with my MacBook and learning all the iOS jargon. I have still been taking the time out to work on the squash game and I think it has improved aesthetically quite a lot. I have added the lighting to the project, at the moment this is just a pointlight above the court. I have also some extra types of shot to the game, these are:

• Lob Shot
• Cross Court Shot

Now that the game has the main three shots I think it is at the point where I can really start applying the "Game Rules". This means adding in the other player and the points system and start dealing with the "Out" and "Double Bounce" logic. 

Before I get round to doing any of that I still need to adjust some things with the new features I have Implemented. Currently most of the light data is hard-coded into the shader which needs changing. Secondly I want to change the light to a large spotlight which will make shadow mapping easier. I also want to add the flexibility to my engine to specify if a model should be affected by light at all because as you can see in this video you can no longer see the sky box very clearly.

Lots of new directions to go with this one, some graphical and some related to game play. I normally tend to sway towards the core graphical stuff but I really need to get to work with the game play so I can stop being ashamed to call it a "game". 

Keep it easy :) 

Since buying my MacBook I have been reading lots of articles and documentation on the apple developer site. I purchased the iOS Developer Program before my Mac had even arrived ( Wanted a head start ). I thought development would be easy due to the fact that you can use C++ instead of objective C and there wouldn't be too much for me to learn. I was very wrong! Just getting used to using my Mac took a while, figuring out where my files are, how to download programs and where they would be. After this hurdle I got myself stuck into xCode the apple IDE for development. This program is pretty chunky and took some getting used to, especially when it came to the Interface Builder.

I'm not going to say exactly what project I'm currently working on as I wouldn't want people to steal the idea but I decided to start initially with a game. Looking back I think it was a little ambitious as now I'm finding it a bit of a struggle. I should have started with something a little simpler. I am currently taking a short break from the one specific game idea and doing a few tutorials which show how to implement some of the features I will need in my app. I am also attempting to learn Objective C rather than try and do all this using C++. Surely It can only work out better if I use the programming language they mainly support.

I am hoping things are going to pick up once I have done these tutorials and everything will just fall into place. 

Cheers :)