Here's the first screen that greeted me once I got my XML parsing working somewhat correctly. It's a grid of (overly large) pegs. I quickly fixed their scale. In addition to being black and white you'll notice is that the pegs have random colors. I have a mechanism for explicitly assigning a particular peg image if necessary.

Next I got the first bucket displaying correctly (from XML instead of hard coding). Objects in the game can have multiple sprites and shapes attached to them. For now I made the bucket a normal rectangle, but there isn't any reason why it can't be a different shape. I'm trying to make it super easy to create new levels. I just don't have time to waste since I'm doing all of this by myself.

The second image is where things stand now. One bucket in the lower left corner and a grid of pegs. It should be trivial to add the remaining buckets now that I have one working. The main thing is to have the game automatically remove pegs that are overlapped by other objects (like buckets).

I placed my preorder for an iPad today. That's a lot of cash to splurge on an unproven piece of tech. Hopefully it was the right decision.

I think I have a nice, clean way of having the game support both iPhone/iTouch and iPad with the same build. There are two downsides to this approach. First, given the required increase in resolution on the iPad, the downloaded package will be larger than it ought to be for iPhone/iTouch users. There just isn't any way around that without compromising the iPad version. I don't expect the game to be huge anyway. Second, the aspect ratio is different between the two so it's not just a simple matter of scaling things up. I have some ideas, but haven't settled on what to do about that yet.

The next object to add to the XML is a ball launcher. I'll start with a simple one, but levels will potentially have different types of launchers. Once I get that then I should be at the same state I was a week or two ago with the last movie.

I recently had a request to seed the NUON Tech Data file that's available as a torrent. Rather than doing that I just uploaded it here. I had to move the site to a different server to get enough space. I believe that went painlessly so I should be set for a while (it's cheaper too!).

NUON Tech Data (209 MB)

I have some of the XML parsing backbone complete. Just enough to get the app to the state it was at before. It isn't debugged yet - hopefully by the end of the week.

In the meantime I want to talk about startup times in iPhone apps. I probably wouldn't have even given it a second thought if I hadn't come across the game Hanto. It's an interesting tile-based strategy game. One of the things that really struck me about it is how quickly it loads. As soon as you tap the app icon the main menu appears. The buttons are not active immediately as it loads in the background, but that only takes 2-3 seconds. It's awesome and in stark contrast to some of the lengthy load times some games have. At least games like Peggle give you entertaining quips to read as it loads.

Another thing I've seen is the ability to turn off the opening splash screen. The Storm8 games allow this, which is great. (Too bad the rest of the load time is a hefty 7-8 seconds.)

As much as it is possible I am going to make my app load quickly. I might throw in an initial splash or title screen, but it won't last long and the user should be able to tap through it. In fact it would be great if the game restores itself to where it was when you left it, bypassing all loading screens.

With that out of the way I actually had to think about what to do next. Unfortunately I believe it is time to get some grunt work out of the way. I need a method for describing levels.

Levels will almost surely be defined by XML files. I need to make sure the definition is extensible enough to handle any additions I might make in the future.

So I might not post for a while as I do this required plumbing. Once I get it done it will be easy to create new objects and levels. I'll need to make a level editor at some point, but in the beginning I'll just create the XML files manually.