Just finished playing Heavy Rain. Been reading interviews with David Cage, the producer of the game. Very interesting experience. I tend toward directed games when the graphics near realism. Perhaps this explains why I enjoy the single player campaigns in CoD: Modern Warfare. Although I believe Halo 3 is too loose in its single player gameplay. Funny how in the days of Virtua Fighter I wanted more realism. Now as we stare the Uncanny Valley straight in the face all I want is reduction in the graphics and more intelligent gameplay. Not harder gameplay. More nuanced and intuitive game mechanics and outcomes.

That's right! I've added Facebook and Twitter integration into Mathogen! I've been thinking about this addition for 6 months now and it's so satisfying to be able to make this announcement. Friends of mine on Facebook and Twitter, sorry in advance for testing these buttons :)

Today I listened to the second to the last episode of the 1UP podcast "4 guys 1 up." They had the creator of "Love" on the show. Love is a programmatically generated indie video game that gets released this week after 3 years of near constant development. The developer said he has been working on it 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. This development process sounds eerily familiar. I guess the "1 man dev teams" all have to pull crazy hours. I wonder if he works full-time too? He didn't say. Super bummed that David Ellis is leaving 1UP to work for Microsoft. They'd be wise to have him podcast there as soon as possible.

Tonight I finished the updates to Mathogen that post the highscores from the iPhone automatically. I still need to update the code on the server to accept or reject the requests. I like programming server code. I like that there's no UI to program. It makes coding very direct. Third night in a row of neurotic programming. Tons of results. I think I'm onto something.

Synthes1s is busy with work today so we cancelled today's hackfest. I'm really hyped on Project Lightning. I designed a few gameplay mock-ups and I'm hyped. We're going to meet at Kahala Mall next weekend. BBQing today with my girlfriend, her sister, and her gfriend. Planning to dip into Mathogen code throughout the day.

Now that I've added online scores I've had to change the behavior of the game. At the end of a game, if you get a top 50 score, it will automatically post it online with your profile name. My girlfriend was playing DoodleJump today. She showed me how they show highscores. Looks like they're using the UIWebView as well. Can't get over how straightforward iPhone programming is. Somehow it all makes sense. I'm finding it really easy to add updates to Mathogen. Cocos2d is the best 3rd party framework for iPhone game development.

I've been programming for 10 hours straight now and my brain is giving up. Today I completed the server code that displays the top 50 scores in the world. I also coded the Mathogen Challenge. The Mathogen Challenge asks the user to pop 100 mathogens before the timer runs out. The faster you play the game, the more points you can win. Once the game is over, if your score is higher than the top 50 in the world, you can be ranked. Super tired now. Planned to rent "Heavy Rain" today at Blockbuster but their only copy is out right now. Going to watch some TV to unwind.

Profile Support:

Player Input Scene:

Player Input Checking:

Local High Scores:

Worldwide High Scores:

I did a lot of programming last night and I wanted to share it with you. There's a lot of programming going on behind the scenes to bring these screenshots to life. I'm really happy with the results. There will be cosmetic changes in the futeure but the coding is all finished :)

Today I took my Dad to breakfast. It was his birthday this week. Over coffee I showed him the updates I made last night. I'm sure all programmers have been in the same boat. You spend the entire night working on code and eagerly show anyone that will listen. Only thing is, they don't see the code behind the scenes. Sometimes the outcome of the most difficult programming looks mundane to the user. He started playing the game in the diner. It was super loud and I asked him to turn it down a couple of times. He kept playing. Today I'm going to work on soundtrack controls :)