You can hide the main status bar by adding this following code to some point in your ‘applicationDidFinishLaunching’ function:

[application setStatusBarHidden:YES animated:NO];

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So, my game just uses the tilt sensors to move around and yet after a few seconds the iPhone would dim the screen causing the user to tap the screen to bring it back to life. This was annoying and it took me a while to discover how to stop it. So, if you are having the same issues then place the following line in your app delegate:

application.idleTimerDisabled = YES;

Seems simple now doesn’t it

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Attending Alex Evan’s talk at Develop this year was an eye opener, especially when Alex opened the talk with ‘We made all the same mistakes that Lionhead did’. See that scares me - mainly because I used to work for Lionhead and I remember what it was like to be a coder there. Don’t get me wrong, Lionhead was a fantastic place to work and has some amazing talent there but one factor that was missing at my time there was planning and it appears this is what Alex is referring to. One of the exciting aspects of working for Lionhead was the relative freedom to experiment with different systems and techniques in coding however this was also its downfall because you found that you had a lot of code that was written, dumped, written again, dumped again and written yet another time. An example of this was a newspaper system I was working on for the console verison of the Movies. I found after we dumped it that at least three or four other coders had implemented the same kind of system and also had theirs dumped - not because it was bad code but because once it was coded it was decided that it didn’t really fit and then they dumped it only to be re-coded when somebody declares that ‘wouldn’t it be great if we had a newspaper system in the game?’. This kind of iterative re-factoring is expensive to projects and I have seen it at a lot more games companies that just Lionhead and I am sure I will see it again. The way Alex was telling it he seemed to believe that LBP had it bad and as a result they are having to pull stupid hours to finish it. His one advice to everyone - place constraints and adhere to them.

So why could this spell doom for Little Big Planet? Mainly because what you end up with on these types of projects is a mixture of messy code masquerading as design that sometimes works but often doesn’t. It worries me that the innovation that is Little Big Planet will not be able to deliver on its basic promise of a social networking game because the approach to delivering that vision was flawed. We need Little Big Planet to be different and we need it to be damn good if we are to change how this industry keeps pumping out ‘me-too’ games.

The ray of sunshine we have is that Alex has a brain the size of a planet so he should be able to pull the game out of the quagmire it appears to be in.

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Zombie cow studios (he of Gibbage fame) has put together $400 that he wants to give away to to some aspiring indie developer that needs it. It’s not a scam so check it out if you need some cash to buy assets or something else:

zombie cow

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I didn’t take much notice of the iPhone SDK previously mainly because there is little point in investing time on something unless I am sure that I will be doing anything on it. My first impressions are that it is quite good. The installation is a breeze and within minutes I had the sample code up and running. This is a complete contrast to setting up dev-kits - I remember the PSP dev-kit taking at least 4 days to setup!

I have lots of ideas for this device bit as a learning exercise I will be doing a bog-standard shoot-email-up afterall, got to start somewhere!

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At last I have it - iPhone Developer Status!

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I got an email recently from Apple telling me that I should hear about my iPhone developer status application soon. I have had an application in since the iPhone came out but because I am based in the UK it’s only recently that they opened it up to the rest of the world. I am sure there are not going to be any hitches in the process because the application consists of clicking a single button - no questions asked. Only thing is it’s taking forever. Ironically I know of people who have got their developer status and haven’t even got an iPhone so wont be making anything for it whereas I got my iPhone as soon as they came out and have been itching to make a cool game for it.

So come on apple - where is my developer status?

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It’s late and the Kaoss pad was just sitting there begging to be played with. So I fired it up and attached the Kaossilator. Not exactly music - NOISE.

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Be the only species in the universe!

Every now and then I get the urge to write a flash game. This happened yesterday morning so I spent most of yesterday coming up with Genocide. The aim of the game is to bomb planets. You have to fly low to charge up your bomb in the time limit. Once the time runs out the bomb explodes - how much it explodes depends on how much charge it has.

It’s still in development so there’s pretty much nothing you can do at the moment. However, I am using mochiads live update feature so this will change

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It’s simple. If you are carrying a knife then you are intending to use it so you get life if caught with it.

We need to stop this senseless slaughter somehow.

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