Hello,
I am aware that currently I have the grand total of 0 (yes, zero!) followers / iphone enthusiasts / developers / interested parties. Rest assured, I have not gone mad and begun 'blogging' to myself. I have always had the intention to bring this blog to life near the time our first 'app' will be released. I am going to pack the blog with information on our first application so that their is plenty of information for you to view upon viewing Seed Games' blog for the first time - With luck, you will keep coming back for more!
So, lets have a small introduction:
Its worth noting that, if you Googled the term "Seed Games" a few months back you may have come across (what I understood to be) a game torrent site. I, or any of those involved at Seed Games and the blog you currently are reading had absolutely nothing to do with that site. Thankfully the site seems to have been taken down. If you are going to pay for any content, it should be for games. A lot of hard work and dedication goes in to a game, do please reward those involved in the development. :)
I am Dan, 19 now and live in sunny Egglescliffe. That is somewhere near Darlington, Middlesbrough, Stockton and local to a lovely part of the country called Yarm. If you ever get the chance to visit (or live locally), make sure you get your self in to the Black Bull in Yarm. By far the best pub around! I am looking forward to September when I shall be going to Uni to study Game Development / Computer Science with Game Development units (Northumbria / Newcastle / Sheffield Hallum / City University (london) or Kingston). In the long term, I hope to win the lottery and become a pilot - though, as anyone who has looked in to this with any depth will know, its ridiculously expensive!
I own a PS3 (currently it has YLOD - Third time I have had that). Im a big Socom fan and am looking forward to Socom 4 in the coming months. That I enjoy playing with the lads from SOD! I have a wide array of games that are sadly gathering dust. I pride myself on two things, 1) my KDR on COD and 2) The fact I am a 'Trophy whore'. I bought Uncharted 1 exclusively for the trophies - It turned out to be a fantastic purchase!
And on to Seed Games...
Seed Games has been in existence for a while now. The idea to develop games begun on one cold December evening with friends in 2009. We were out, discussing ideas for things we should do on a night (baring in mind I was 17 for another few weeks whilst the others wouldn't be 18 for 6 or so months - The pub was out of the question). I thought back to the many times in the past I have wanted to make computer games. Suddenly my mouth began to move and I had suggested the idea! I think the suggestion went down a treat as my (2) mates began to take an interest in the whole idea.
They both enjoyed playing games on a wide variety of consoles, and both had experience with Game Maker in secondary school. We began tossing ideas around, some realistic... some not. Ultimately, I would say, our enthusiasm got the better of us. Apparently we were going to be making the next HD First Person Shooter! Clearly this was never going to happen, so we did some research. It was agreed that I would be doing the coding.
In the early days, we toyed with Dark Basic, FPS creator, Game Maker 8 and Torque game builder. Nothing grabbed me, or in fact us.
1 of us owned an Ipod touch. I had been keen to buy one (along with a Mac for that matter) so suggested we develop on the Apple system. It took a little bit of convincing as, well, one of us wouldnt have the system to play the finished product. Though it was agreed it was a fantastic platform to build games on... especially for newbies.
I took a lot of inspiration from a youtuber named Leuvsion (see below this paragraph for a link). He had set himself a challenge to build an iPhone game in 30 days. Start to finish including learning the programming language.
http://www.youtube.com/user/leuvsion
Christmas came as did new year (and my birthday :D). My ipod touch was with me and I instantly fell in love with it. Cracking bit of kit. My mac was bought and delivered on the 5th of January. I got myself a lovely 13" MacBook - 2.26Ghz Duel Core, 2GB DDR3. Costly yes, but worth it. OSX is, in many ways better that XP / Vista / 7. XCode is a joy to use (Compiler, you write code in this 'program'), Objective C is a lovely, simple and powerful language to know. UIKit is a nice place to start with game development and Open GL ES is a graphics system used throughout the industry! Win win win I say!
Now it should be noted that I had to have a Mac in order to develop on the apple systems (including Desktops and Ipads). Yes I could have got myself a nice gaming rig for that price but since Flight Simulator (2004 - as I have a vast array of addons) is the only game I play for PC, Im not at all fussed.
Leuvsion and his 30 day iPhone game making videos introduced me to a few new terms and books I should buy. For those interested, these are: Programming in Objective C 2.0 (Steven Kochan) and Cocco Programming for Mac OS X (Aaron Hillegass).
Granted the latter is for Mac OS X development and not iPhone - but the lessons are still relevant. For the newbies around who maybe interested in beginning iPhone development, I would suggest buying Beginning iPhone 3 Development along with the Objective C book. Followed by Learning iOS Game Programming by Mike Daley. This will introduce Open GL ES and game engines! Cracking read.
So after learning Objective C... In something like 5 months. I had hopped to rattle through it but I tell you, its hard! Learning a programming language is hard. Prepare to spend hours reading over the same paragraph over and over again! I may have, at times of pure frustration damaged my book! Though, it is worth noting that once you get cracking with typing your own code, you will eventually get it. By that I mean, once you sit down and finish your first program you will feel like you know everything. The difference between you after a month of learning and after a your first program is huge.
So, after Objective C I was a bit lost. After Googling around, I learnt about Open GL ES. For those who are in a similar situation to me, I would seriously advice you go away and produce a game similar to Pong using "UI Kit. Do not touch Open GL ES. It has a seriously tough learning curve to it. Especially if you wish to make your game fully with your own code.
Alternatively, you could have a look at Cocos2D - which is a game engine all ready for you to use. Its not 'drag and drop' like Torque so at least you are doing some good amounts of code. In a decent sized project, you will likely write over 1000 lines of code.
So I began to learn Open GL ES using the fantastic tutorials by Mike Daley at 71 Squared. These tutorials should be one of the first places to go when you are planning on loosing your social life to learning Open GL ES.
http://www.71squared.com/
I began to make my way through these tutorials. Now, I was not in the right place to do this. Hence why I suggest you go back and make a game or two with UI Kit. Practise your if statements, your For loops etc.
I see this post has become quite big - Im therefore going to publish it and make another tomorrow. At this point of the (I guess) 2/3 part post, I have my Macbook, Ipod touch a few good books and beginning to make a small mistake that would cost me about 3-4 months of development time by learning Open GL ES. Read the next post(s) for what I did next. How my first project ended up a complete mess (lessons for all developers especially to learn!!) and how my first release is coming along!
Dan
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