Super fun game that had me excited about it the entire time I was playing. Love the leveling up with a new plant or accessory each time I beat a level. Tangible, expected goals made the game smooth and seamless. Smooth animations (done in flash) and strangely arresting characters made the game a joy to play. I especially like how they varied the game play but kept the core mechanic relatively unchanged. I aspire to make a casual game as engrossing as this. Well done PopCap.

Now that the memory leaks have been patched and the global variables are working, I'd like to begin adding the functionality I've been writing about for a few months now. I feel like I'm at the point in coding for iPhone that I'm no longer encumbered by the code. Next steps here are to draw it all out on paper. I need to storyboard the updates to the game. I was very encouraged yesterday when I met with a friend in IT at work yesterday. He told me that every time his nephew comes over to his house he says, "Uncle, I want to play your math game on your iPhone." That made my day :) Here is the list of items I'm planning to work on. Not sure if all of these updates are going to make it to version 1.0.2 but I'd like to list all of them out anyway:

•  Player Profiles
• World-wide high scores
• New website header image
• World map

Programming at my Dad's house today while we watch the Superbowl. Planning to program during the commercial breaks. Really looking forward to today's game. Planning to work on the stats screens today. Ok, time to get back to the game!

I never thought it'd make this noticeable of a difference but ever since I patched up the memory leaks, Mathogen is so much faster. Tonight I moved most of my ivar sprites out to the global scope and the game relaunches faster than ever. Still have a few pesky labels that need to be made global. Playing lots of new iPhone games lately. Super interested in canabalt and doodle jump right now (for their facebook and twitter integration). So seemless.

Spent the remainder of the night identifying and patching memory leaks in the new build of Mathogen and got it down from 73 leaks to just 1 leak! I'm so happy to have gotten this far but that last leak is driving me crazy. Posted another question on the cocos2d forum and they've suggested that I upgrade my chimpmunk physics. Tonight I'm off to research the process to upgrade the physics library in my game. My friend and I talked about game development over dinner. Game development is so much fun but it's so isolating.

Worked on memory leaks for 6 hours straight today. I patched most of the leaks but, after researching chipmunk physics online, I noticed that since chipmunk is a port from C, some of the memory freeing functions are not as clean as they should be. Thinking that redesigning the physics code is required. This will involve going back to the drawing board to figure out when to initialize the bodies, where to store them, how to interact with them, and how to free them elegantly when the game ends. I am so determined to get this finished. I'm planning to work on it all night until Mathogen is lightning fast. I'm so close!

I miss the old days of playing Doom on a LAN with abundant pizza and soda. Tonight I'm debugging physics code. Apparently the bodies and shapes are being retained and causing the new build to crash. All progress toward the bigger picture I suppose. There are times I would be willing to pay $100 to have an instant answer. Sometimes it takes several days to figure out things. Progress has been slow and tedious. I don't enjoy the debugging part of software development.