Hi Everyone,
I spent about 3 months last year converting my game engine to iOS and then converting the game code from the Java code of the Android versions to Objective C for iOS. The conversion stalled when I ran out of spare funds for hardware.
I'm now working again on the conversions of Solo Hero and Space Hippies for iOS. I have both games running on an iPad but I'm concentrating mostly on Solo Hero for now.
As far as the engine code goes -
Rendering is now about 95% complete. I have a few rendering primitives (line/circle/textured circle) to implement. Although the rendering methods on Android OpenGL and iOS OpenGL are broadly similar I have found it neccessary to implement different methods in some cases. I have a few tweaks on the rendering states too. I added a few graphical features to Solo Hero last year after I'd done the conversion work so I'll have to add those once the existing rendering code is complete.
Audio code is running 100% as far as I can tell. I'm using OpenAL which is new to me for this project and I'd not managed to get any audio working before I abandoned the conversions last year. When I started looking at audio methods again last week it quickly became clear that OpenAL was the best solution for what I am trying to achieve and once I'd settled on it the programming was very straight-forward. I've got some work to do on the samples but that's polish and doesn't IMO count as audio programming :)
Touch code is running 100% but there was at least one case where it failed to detect a touch release. This can wait till testing. This was much harder to implement that for Android. What I've done essentially emulates how Android handles the touch screen before feeding the result into the Objective C version of the Android touch-handling code.
File I/O is running 100%. This was relatively simple to implement; just a case of learning about the apps "sandbox" file system. I only store the high-scores and a small number of settings so it only involves the maintenance of a <5k data file.
And on the game side -
The game is running but there are several gameplay bugs and the screen layouts need reworking. I will prioritise the gameplay bugs and leave the layout issues until the end of development.
The full original version of Solo Hero has a Real-Time Strategy style control interface. In 2015 I created a 'lite' free version of the game with an alternate interface called "Solo Hero Rush". It's my intention to add this to the full Android version as a top-level choice; a different way of playing the game with a separate set of rewards. I'll add this to the iOS versions before release rather than leave it to a later update.
Overall, the conversion is going much better than I'd anticipated and so I'm hoping to release my first iOS game in the very near future. That said I've worked on enough game projects over the years to know that you can never relax until the game is "out the door" as there is always a new challenge waiting just around the corner. I'll keep posting regular progress reports so please keep checking back here :)
Thanks for reading!
best wishes,
Martin @ Ludopus
