Worked around

I found a workaround which is to completely redo the entire way I was planning to show an end-of-game screen. Stupid Cocos2d. It's been nothing but helpful up to this point, but I could not figure out how to unpause it.

The game is now functionally complete, so I'm basically looking at polish + market + ship.

stuck

Argh, I am totally stuck on a bug with ReplaceScene. Cocos2d seems to have problems with a scene replacing itself.

I may eventually have to just work around this bug.

Fucking clown shoes

So my apartment was burglarized on Friday when I wasn't home. My iMac (with all of my pictures from the past 3 or 4 years, not backed up because I'm an idiot) among many other things were taken, mostly electronics. It got me thinking, all of these devices have network cards in them, why the fuck do the manufacturers not track these things when they show up on the net?

Imagine the day where stealing an Internet-enabled device is useless because it phones home as soon as it hops online. Sure, measures could be taken to circumvent phoning home, but it would really be bad news for small time criminals. I know software that does this exists, but why isn't that shit considered part of the base functionality? It's such a stupid omission.

If Apple tracked every unique IP address per computer and gave me access, I could just find out exactly where that machine got online, call the police and say "it's near / at this address". Done. Would probably even be able to recover my pictures with some good HD tools. Unfortunately it's not the future yet, so we're stuck dealing with the police who don't really give a shit and have better things to do. Thus, electronics will continue to be an awesome reason to break into people's homes. Suck.

It's a game!

My game is now an actual game instead of a tech demo. It can be played, it has a victory (really a loss) condition, and it can be restarted. Woo!

I feel like this app will mostly serve as a learning experience and I'll be able to do much cooler stuff in the future in a lot less time.

Tech Journalists

This is the most ridiculous (iPad) article. I can't believe someone got paid to write that. Ugh.

OpenGL and Cocos2d

Turns out it's reasonably tricky to draw raw polys correctly in a multi-layered Cocos scene, but I figured out how to do it. Now the ground in the game is repaired and I can work on the boss monster.

I think I may localize this game by not having a single word in it.

Particle effects

I am adding particle effects left and right. They have to be the cheapest way (in a Cocos2d game) to add visual appeal for the programming effort.

I also found out that a 1024x1024 PVRTC 4bpp texture makes the simulator run at 30fps, but the 3gs still runs at a totally smooth 60fps.

I think the hardest part of iPhone development is never having the assurance that you're going to sell enough copies to make it all worthwhile. Sigh...