After a fair brief stint of working on a Native Objective C App (A Non-Game…Shock and Horror), I am finally back to working on games. The 2 or so months I spent ‘learning’ Objective C was actually a nice break from normal development and gave me a greater sense of confidence in being able to add/extend functionality when need to on  iOS devices. Prior to that I was very much looking at things purely from a C++ point of view and trying to ‘avoid’ using any Objective C.

The best big of strangeness was making sure I got my head wrapped around Objective C memory management. With C++ it was new/delete and life was easy or you could use Boost to smart ptrs and so on. With Objective C, I couldn’t figure out why my memory was going out of scope (Oh you do a retain), the way it handles private instance variables  and a hours of going “Oh that’s what you want me to do”.

Some cheesy fries with please

Now i’m back to Game Development, I am using Cocos2D for development. The biggest reason is to keep the footprint small because I am looking at how games instead of strictly always running stand alone can be packaged with other Non-Game Apps.

What I learnt from Last Call, is that there is just too many games out there on the iTunes. They are all fighting for space and customers simply don’t have the time to try them all. With this is mind (and being the new year and all), I thought a more prudent approach was to look at what customers are interested in first of all. You know real people, you want to reach with your games. For example interests such as food, fashion, cars, sports etc all need Apps done. With In-App purchase you could package a game with a clothing theme in a Fashion App.

Well that’s what I think anyways. I’ll let you know how this new company strategy when the Apps come out.