Progress on Samantha

I've been working over the weekend on Trivia primarily, getting things working with XML. I had a good chat with my mom and given the lack of questions that I have and the upcoming deadline for Samantha, I decided to put the Trivia game back on the back-burner and focus on Samantha. I've got a wiki up on my website where I'm putting the user stories. It's interesting working with the wiki instead of my older standby, but I think the wiki is a little better. I get to see modifications over time, I can categorize both by "user story" and by "iteration"... It's not what I'd recommend for organizations looking to integrate agile processes into their development teams, but if you've got a team (read: me) that's as familiar with agile as I am, then it's a reasonable shortcut. Besides, I've been using the wiki for a variety of other things (creating the back story, etc).
So far I've only got about 5 stories in the wiki, but I think I've got a handle on the other stories I need to add. I've done a lot of ruminating on the game and I think I've got the systems down. There's a LOT of back story left to fill in as well as tables and TABLES of things to create (combat stuff, etc). The cool thing is that I've been working on the tab control for navigation and I have an awesome image for one of the tabs. It came out SO nice - I was amazed. I've still got 3 other tabs to get looking similarly excellent, but it was just so cool to see that come out as well as it did. I'll start posting pictures when I get closer to having it together.
In other news, still no word back from Apple on the developer program. It's only Wed and there was a weekend involved, but I had hoped that I would hear something back sooner. I guess even Apple moves at the speed of bureaucracy. :) The website still shows "need company documents" as well. I'm just in a holding pattern right now - when it changes, I'll post.
One major piece of personal news. A few months ago we were talking to my best friend Dan about his daughter and the Denver Broncos Junior Cheerleaders. I thought that since he was a big Broncos fan that it might be cool if his daughter Amy tried to get into the program. I thought they had agreed it would be cool, so I signed Cathy up. Only to find out later that they hadn't signed up Amy. Okay. But now - Cathy's able to join! She's been excited about the prospect of being a cheerleader, so now we need to find out if she's still interested even if Amy's not doing it. We'll see, but it's kind of a big deal for us. We're not huge Broncos fans (I think the last game I went to or really even watched was in 2005), but Cathy's a big cheerleader fan. I'm trying not to post too much about personal stuff in this dev blog, but occasionally exciting things like that will slip in. :)
I guess that's it for now. Tonight we're getting more snow - 2" to 6" - but it's not the amount that's an issue, it's when - rush hour. Yay, joy. :( Oh well. And more snow on Saturday. Maybe I'll get stuck at home and work loads and tons on Samantha. :) Of course, I'm going to need Beta testers... Need to start exploring the options there...

Gettin' 'er done!

After I completed the basic game play last night on trivia with the canned data I started working on getting it to work with 'live-like' data from the website. It's been a little slower than I hoped, but I've been getting the XML parsing integrated pretty well into the application. By the time I'm done, I'll have likely doubled the app size. :) This morning's going to be spent trying to get it to download the XML from the web and then get the parsing started. I've got plans for the afternoon, so I won't likely get back to this until tonight at the earliest.
I'm just liking how things are starting to come together and seeing hourly progress has been a wonderful change from the hours of beating my head against the wall. :)

Trivia Update

It's been a pretty good few days. I've finished the basic game play for trivia. I had previously done some background graphics and those worked beautifully in the game. There are still some things to do:

• Icons for all of the categories (for buttons)
• Question parsing in the application
• Question creation on server
• Database storage for game persistence on iPhone
• More questions than I can even possibly imagine

I have been considering using XML as the format for the questions. I like it for a variety of reasons, but the problem is that its a very verbose format. Data transfer is always a concern with iPhone apps and the smaller the format and the more compression I can do, the less I need to worry about killing someone's phone while they play. I may still use XML as the full format but compress it before I send it.

As for the rest of it, the major part of the work that I need to do is get the server to start serving the pages. I'm going to be getting a basic XML file set up on the website so I can at least see it serve the file and then parse it on the app side. Then I can add a small interface one both sides to compress/decompress the data.

On the dev program front, I still haven't received the email or seen the website update yet. I'm hoping that soon things will be sorted out and updated.

Making Progress

Well, it's been a pretty good couple of days. Pretty productive, actually. Here's what's been going on with development.

With Trivia, I've been getting the view flow working the way I want, which has been great. I've been adding in some functionality as I go just to make sure that it works properly and it has been. Like I said before, this is a big "Yay" moment as I have been making good progress. All I can say is that I'm pretty stoked as I get moving with this stuff. It's been a long time coming, but as all developers can tell you, when you finally get something working and things start clicking it's hard to stop. :)

As for Samantha, I've been making some good progress on the game systems. I'm working on combat right now and trying to figure out how much some of the actions cost - it's been interesting seeing how tweaking elements change the dynamics. For instance, I increased the damage caused by an action by one point of damage and it completely altered how combat worked. I've been able to make some good progress on it, but there's a lot more to do still. I think I'm going to be able to start finalizing the systems in the next week and then start coding it up.

I think given the progress that I'm making on trivia, though, that I'll try to finish the coding for that by the end of next week and then it's just TONS and TONS and TONS of data entry trying to get the trivia questions in the database. I also need to make two versions of the game. One thing that I've seen again and again in the blogs I'm reading is that having a trial/lite version of the game, especially if it's free, really does a lot for sales. Owen at Streaming Colour is seeing about 2-3% conversion rate on lite-to-full version, which is just amazing (many companies are happy with 0.1% or 1/30th of what he's seeing). He has put his game on sale (it originally went for $4.99 and now it's being priced at $2.99). I think the $4.99 price was a mistake and the $2.99 price is a good price point. He's got a good game, but $4.99 was a bit of a put-off.

For Trivia, I'm thinking of pricing it at around $1.99 for the full version (lite will obviously be free). The lite version will also be locked so that it only asks for Kids questions (as opposed to the full version which will offer 7 more categories and a Miscellaneous category). I'm hoping that $1.99 is going to be competitive with other games in the market (when last I looked it was). I'm also hoping that the model I'm using where the questions are served from a central database will make it more interesting for people as the number of questions can be expanded. That, plus the online leader board that I'm going to do will separate it from several of the other offerings out there. So long as I can make the quality of the questions better, that may help differentiate. It's definitely not what I'm looking at for a huge cash cow long-term - it's a good way of getting Otto Von's name out there and generating some buzz for the other games (I hope). :)

We're supposed to get a major snow storm tonight (8+ inches), so I'm probably just going to hunker down and work on stuff as much as possible. We'll see how good conditions are in the morning as to whether I go in to work, but I'm actually planning on not going in right now and if I do, I will definitely be leaving early. And Susie's still planning on coming back Friday afternoon from her business trip, so it's a busy week and weekend.

On the Apple developer program front, still nothing. I emailed them on Monday and faxed the documents again, but still no word other than "Requested documents must be received". :( I'll post up more when I hear more from them.

That's it for now. Centennial, Colorado signing off. :)

Small Victory

I've been working on some things for the Empire Lyric Players (making rehearsal CDs if you must know), so I haven't been working on Project Samantha. I have, however, been working on making a couple of things work with Trivia. I got several new books* on iPhone development and one of the books finally had an example that did what I'm trying to do with the game.

One thing about the trivia game is that while it's similar to pretty much any other trivia game out there, trivia games are, by their implementation, anathema to iPhone user interface guidelines. There's no navigating back, there's no lists... It just doesn't fit the paradigm. Of course, since most books about developing for a platform (and conference sessions) tend to encourage the existing paradigms, doing something weird like trivia doesn't flow from the general texts. Until now, that is. :)

This book that I picked up, Beginning iPhone Development, is quite nice and has an example about multi-view applications that was just what I needed to move forward. There were some things that I wasn't doing correctly (and didn't realize weren't being done automagically) that doomed every previous effort to failure. With this new-found wisdom, however, I was actually able to get some of the flow working correctly. There is still a LOT to do to actually make the game into a workable system, but this was one of those A-HA! moments that gave me an insight into how the paradigm works. I was also able to extend some functionality without any trouble, which shows that I'm actually absorbing some of the Objective-C.

So, overall, a big YAY today as I got moving a little closer to understanding. And as I mentioned earlier, Samantha will actually follow more of the standard paradigm so it should be easier than trivia - amazingly.

* If you're interested, here's the list of books I've picked up so far:

• iPhone Developer's Cookbook
• iPhone SDK
• iPhone SDK Programming
• Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X

Wiki?

I've added a Wiki to the Otto Von site for the products that will be coming out. I'm going to be putting things up there about game play and systems as well as general help files. Project Samantha in particular may be a very complex game on some levels, so rather than embed tons of help files, I'm likely just going to add some brief help and a provide a link to the Wiki so people can look up things there. I can't imagine there will be too much help needed for the trivia game, but Samantha has the potential for some dizzyingly complicated components.
Anyway, the link's above if you're interested. There's some regular Otto Von stuff (like articles about the company) up there right now and more will follow later.

Radical Concept

Originally written 18 March 2009.

So I was reading through Daniel Cook's blog at Lost Garden about paintbox games. Danc is one of my former coworkers from Anark and one of the most brilliant individuals I've ever had the opportunity to know. He has an incredible talent of being able to synthesize global concepts from a number of disparate ones - like taking quantum mechanics, audio, global financial markets, and user interface design and coming up with a way of examining Nintendo. He boggles my mind, actually.
One of the things he said really made me sit up and take notice. In a blog from 2006 of all things, I found the following in his description of paintbox games: "The player can build or assemble something new and unique to the world." This got me thinking about Project Samantha, of course. One of the things that I have been working on lately is the list of artifacts that are available in the game. This began as the basic list of "mana gems" and moved into "affinity stones" and then into "creature body parts" (being like a Red Dragon's Claw). One thing that I liked from the origianl AD&D was the whole idea of people creating various artifacts (Machine of Lum the Mad). I began creating a list of mythical people from the game's past (including some obvious ones like Eisus (Susie spelled backwards) and some other that are names of characters I made for D&D). But it got me to wondering, though - why not allow players to create their own artifacts?
By allowing people to create their own artifacts including some easy ones like mana gems and using creature parts from guardians they kill to really difficult ones, players would be able to impact the future of the game directly. One thing that I want to do with the Trivia game is set it up so that players can submit questions and they'll get credit for it when the question is displayed (like, "Who won the MLB MVP trophy in 2009? - Provided by Joe Blow"). But in Samantha, players can create artifacts that will bear their name (the "Diadem of Joe Blow"). I need to figure out exactly how that's going to work in practice, but I think the idea is SOOOOOO completely compelling that I have to find a way to make it happen.
Anyway, that's just some thinking while I work on game systems. Yet another system to design and implement. Yay. :)

Trivia Game Update

So you might be asking yourself why I've posted up about things like the logo and not at all about the trivia game that I said I was working on creating. The reason is that the trivia game is somewhat stalled while I read through several different books about iPhone development. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've been trying to do some things that are not completely supported as iPhone paradigms.
The basic flow of the program is simple - one view moves to another. The thing is that it doesn't use the navigation toolbar (the bar at the top of the view that lets you navigate backwards ("pop" the views)) since that doesn't make sense. But just displaying a view and navigating to another view that doesn't provide direct navigation back isn't something readily supported.
There's a paradigm shift between MFC's doc/view architecture and the iPhone's "kinda" MVC (model-view-controller) model that's just not sinking in quickly for me. That or I understand it but can't seem to get the code to do what I want (which actually may be more likely). As a result, I've been spending a lot of brain share on the other game (which is actually a bit more iPhone paradigm-friendly) I'm developing.
The other major hurdle to the trivia game is, of course, the questions. It's not that I can't think of any - let's get real. :) What's troublesome is the data entry. I'd like to have thousands of questions (if not tens of thousands) and that's a LOT of data entry. Given Taekwondo three times a week, ballet for Cathy two days a week, and ELPs rehearsals two days a week, there's just not a lot of time to do tedious typing. Plus, this second game, which I am posting about but those posts are private right now, has the potential to really make a HUGE splash and actually generate some good revenue. That's my hope at least. Then I can hire Jason Hayes to write the music for it (his music is completely made of awesome). :)
Anyway, I wanted to sort of clarify what was going on there since this is theoretically a blog about development. I will likely start making some of the 2nd game posts (codenamed "Samantha") public since I'll be talking about how I'm making the game, not what the game is or the context or anything. It should be general enough to start making those available for review. :)
Of course if you have any questions, feel free to comment. I hope that it will prove interesting for some people at least.

First Game

The first game that I've been working on developing is a trivia-style game. Because it's not like anyone else has had that idea for the iPhone yet. (That would be sarcasm). There are currently at least 5-10 games for the iPhone that are trivia-based games with one using the same style of game-play that I'm exploring.
For those that know me, they know that trivia is one of those games that I love - I mean truly love. I know a lot of information about things that have no practical relevance and I delight in knowing it. Like knowing that the plastic end of a shoelace is called an aglet. Yeah, sad, I know.
When I left iTi in November Susie (my wife) and I began talking about things that I could do and the one thing that made the most sense was to write games for the iPhone. We were getting new phones at the end of November and it just made sense to work on iPhone games since it's such a hot market. It's also a tough market. I heard that there are now over 25,000 apps in the App Store. A lot of them are free, but a significant portion cost something. And Apple apparently keeps 30% of the sales, meaning that on a $4.99 game, the developer's only getting $3.49. No wonder Apple likes the App Store. :)
Anyway, Susie and I came up with a list of like 15 game ideas. A couple of days later it dawned on me that I should do something that I know well - like trivia! So I began working on a trivia game. And ran into my first roadblocks.
As I mentioned in my first post, I've been developing software professionally for over 15 years and writing code for almost 28 years now (scary, huh?). Most of that development work has been in Windows using Microsoft Foundation Classes (what MS pushed for years before they came out with .NET and C#). Developing for Mac is a bit different and some of the things that I'm used to doing in Windows aren't available or are done in a way that's just different enough that my brain can't seem to grok it. In particular, I ran into issues with views and view controllers. I'm actually still having some trouble with them and have sort of put development on the back burner.
The main features of my game are that it will have a server back-end that will provide the questions. The main benefit that I see with this approach long-term is that if the back-end works properly then I can expand it to be practically any other platform - Windows, Mac, Android, etc. If you're at all familiar with NTN trivia, this would be a mobile version of that. Online leader boards, etc.
I've also flirted with several different ideas for how to monetize the whole enterprise. One idea is that I provide the game for free (which gives me a much broader exposure) but then put ads in the app (using AdMob) and/or on the online leaderboard (using Google AdWords or similar). This would be a good passive revenue stream and be completely independent of Apple's limits on payments (I have read that they don't issue any payments unless you surpass $250 sales in one region).
Another idea for generating revenue is to have a free version that doesn't store your scores online or track your progress, but lets you play a few games before needing to restart the application. The issue I see with that is that it could likely be cracked very easily and then people would be able to have unlimited play (without the leaderboard).
In all situations, security and insuring that the player has a legal copy is one thing that will need to be addressed. It's also something I need to learn how to do effectively on the iPhone. I read a post by the author of Dapple where he said that the first sale of his program was to a cracker who posted it up on a warez site within 5 hours. Ouch.
As for the trivia game, I've started building the question database and hope to be able to find solutions to the navigation issues I've been experiencing. The issue I'm running into is that while the game flow system I have in mind is simplistic, it's not fully supported by the iPhone paradigms, so I have to find ways to make it work within Apple's constructs. Once that flow problem is resolved, I should be able to integrate everything else relatively easily (there is plenty of sample code that does what I want to do). Then I just need to make sure the application is secure and get it published. :)
More to come later.