So, here is my silly idea for an iphone game. I may get around to making it, but equally don’t mind if others do (just let me have a copy, and some money for coming up with the idea, of course).

I like Turn-Based Strategy (TBS) games like Valkyria Chronicles on the PS3, Advance Wars on the DS, etc. I seem to prefer these to Real Time Strategy (RTS) games because you have more time to think about what you are doing, it’s more like my old tabletop Warhammer 40K gaming with little painted lead models – and because I’m an old git who can’t think / use a mouse fast enough for RTS games.

So I’d love to have a TBS game on my iPod Touch as then I can happily sit on the sofa and play it all evening. So I got to thinking about that – I’m not a games designer, I do write them and their tools / infrastructure but I really don’t design them. That’s a very particular skill that I’ve never really explored / developed.

So anyway – here is my non-game-designer game design. Brace yourself.

• Turn Based Strategy
• three basic unit types: Rock, Paper, Scissors
• You can guess which will win in a fight (Rock beats Scissors, Paper beats Rock, Scissors beats Paper, if you really can’t remember that game).
• Rock moves slowly (beacuse it’s heavy) but can move through water (because it’s robust)
• Paper can fold up into a plane and fly (moving quickly), can’t move through water because it goes mushy
• Scissors can move quickly over land because it has ‘long legs’ but can’t move through water because it rusts
• Paper has a special ‘area attack’ where it unfolds and flattens a large area
• Scissors has a high speed attack that can hit the same target multiple times
• Rock has a smash attack that can break through obstacles
• You fight for control of sources of WIN
• You can make units from WIN (they are literally made of win)
• When you have enough WIN you literally WIN
• turn-based should mean its easy to play against someone on a network, or even by email
• Graphics would start out fairly simple too — but I could improve them in time

Any feedback so far?

I finally managed to pull my finger out – well, move my iMac into the lounge temporarily – and have started some iPhone/iPod development. It’s actually not bad so far, I haven’t really used XCode or written Objective-C before and they are both taking a bit of getting used to. But overall, ok so far.

My first little app is a utility for myself really – when good enough it will go up on the App Store. It’s a little app that really just does some adding up – it does snooker scoring. “That’s not much of a utility!” I hear you say… well mutter. I know it might not seem like it, but if you actually keep track of the score yourself, you can always know how close someone is to winning, what their maximum break could be, and some other nice little things. I was watching the Masters tournament on TV with a little table of “number of reds left –> score remaining” and then doing some maths to work out how the game was going. It was surprisingly useful, hence doing the more involved utility.

Also, I recently found out they have don’t show you the on-screen graphics when at a live snooker tournament – you can see the scores but don’t know things like maximum break / points remaining unless good at maths or very used to the ‘snooker maffs’. So this little util could be handy. For some! I’m not saying it’s for everyone…

It’s a good first little project, anyway

That whole ‘post every day’ thing didn’t last long. Doh!

What I’m going to try and do instead is to update my twitter a bit more often – after an upgrade to WordPress 2.7 (which I highly recommend) you can now see my latest ‘tweets’ on my blog. So you may want to follow them if you wish?

Supernatural is a bit of a guilty pleasure. I didn’t see it when it was on ITV a while ago, they foolishly advertised it with the line “Scary just got Sexy” but what they should have said was “It’s like Lost Boys the series.” It’s very 80s, basically a show about two brothers, a cool black car and lots of evil stuff to kill – Demons, Vampires, Warewolves, Evil Spirits and all manner of hoodoo. Yay!

All it’s missing is Keifer Sutherland as a vampire and it’d be perfect!

One of the joys of a walk to work is laughing at the Brighton argus headlines. Fortunately there is now a flickr group so you can all enjoy it!

Such as:

And:

I just love porridge at the moment! No, not the Ronnie Barker prison sitcom. I mean the nummy combination of rolled oats and milk.

I started making porridge a couple of weeks ago and have had it for breakfast on week-days almost every day since then! I think its the cold mornings and walk to work, and porridge is very satisfying, both to eat and have a lovely warm and full tum, but also to make in the mornings. There’s something about stirring a hot pan on a hob first thing in the morning that is quite soothing… and it only takes a couple of minutes, so even I can fit it into my morning routine. (As an added bonus I always make enough for B as well, as she doesn’t ‘do’ breakfast otherwise.)

So, here’s to porridge! Hooray!