I have also decided on the game title to be called: Run Monkey Run.

The aim of the game is fairly simple, the monkey will automatically run across the screen and you have to avoid dangerous creatures such as Snakes, Tigers & Lions whilst collecting as many bananas on your away and making sure you jump over the gaps and don’t crash into a wall.

There will only be one control which is to tap the screen to jump, which should make it simple to implement and also play.

Here is a photo of what I sketched out yesterday for the game level, the scene and objects will be random and if I have time the parallax background and scene will be different depending on progress or just pure randomness to keep the interest.

I have also come up with some more ideas about the game:

• Collect Bananas – but be careful not to jump for them if a gap is coming up, you could die.
• Collecting Bananas will build up your naanaPowers (I remember as a child and most call bananas naana’s), they will also animate up to the naanaPowers bar to add to your collection.
• King of the Jungle – X Amount of collected Bananas – will turn the monkey into a gorilla with special powers TBD (if I have time for this)
• Magic Ropes (TBD) – I am thinking that in certain places on the level there could be a dangling rope from a tree if you jump and grab it it could fling you into the clouds for a bonus banana level, however the ropes have a twist and some pesky snakes could be hanging from a tree to look like a rope which would lead to death.

So that’s my thought’s for now, seems like a lot to get on with I also made this short loop which I am thinking about using for my Main Menu in the game.

Aaron

Game thoughts:

• To travel the furthest distance without hitting a wall or object (enemy)
• Parallax Scrolling backgrounds
• No time limit, but the character will speed up after X distance and the game becomes harder
• Only one control tap to jump

For making the game I have thought about the tools and will use:

• Corona SDK will be used to make the development quicker – I will perhaps use this for a few months but would like to ideally move onto cocos2D
• As the game needs to be playable it will be released for Android on Google Play as review times are much less than Apple’s

So with my initial goal of creating one game in 2013 has now turned into 12! However I see this as a great opportunity to learn game development and build up my skills and who knows during the next 12 months one of the games may inspire me to further develop it into a mobile game live on the app stores.

Last year when I attended I learnt a valuable lesson, WWDC isn’t just about the sessions the most value comes from networking, meeting like minded people and also the lab sessions, I got this quite wrong last year although I met a great bunch of UK Developers I did spend most of my time studying my notes and taking all the information onboard.

I would recommend for any first timers of WWDC this year to make networking one of your top priorities after all the session videos became available very quickly after the event.

So back onto the subject of the business cards, I decided to get some designed via 99designs.com and here is the winning design being sent to Moo.com this week you can see the designs just below.

Although I will probably be giving out my twitter handle more than cards, its certainly handy to have them available just in case.

Business Card Front

Business Card Back

My problem was that my Mac / XCode expects git to be in /usr/bin/git so I just had to create a symlink

1) sudo ln -s /usr/local/git/bin/git /usr/bin/git

2) CD to your project folder

3) Type git init

4) Type git add .

5) Type git commit -m “Initial Commit”

6) Re open XCode and it should now be working under the newly created git repository.

 

 

I’m struggling to find a day to day use for the iPad, it’s great for using whilst in front of the TV or in Bed in the morning to check emails / browse the internet but apart from that I have not used it much yet.

Maybe it’s just that there are not many good iPad applications out there at the moment, I have downloaded the WordPress iPad application but it seems rather limited, there is also no Facebook application, calculator or clock application.

How is everyone else getting on with the iPad in the UK?

Under Settings – Cellular Data – APN you need to have the following entered:

APN: ibrowse.o2.co.uk

Username: browse

Password: password

I also found that you could only register your micro sim on the iPad, which is also very confusing at first I disabled WiFi and launched Safari, a pop up appeared and mentioned that I was not registered for 3G Network and would I like to register, when I clicked Now i got an error not found message.

To register i enabled WiFi Network then went to settings Cellular Data and clicked a register button in this screen, this took me through a wizard which let me choose my data plan and then pay via credit / debit card.

It’s a shame the iPad / O2 does not make this more simple It would be great if you was not registered and only on 3G that the Safari popup asking you to register actually worked and allowed you to register, as it seems a shame for WiFi to be a requirement for registering for 3G.

The new icon hopefully looks more appealing compared to the old version and helps sell the story of what our application is all about.

Calc VAT – The iPhone VAT Calculator is still ranking no.1 on iTunes searches with the keyword “VAT” and no.4 with the term “UK Tax” here is how Calc VAT appears today in the iTunes search with it’s new icon.

VAT Calculator ranking

Since then a lot has changed with the application and two major versions were released, however over the past two weeks we have started to see that Calc VAT iTunes rank is slowly dropping and now it is time to take action.

VAT Calculator Rank

The Vat Calculator application seems perfectly fine but with the help of some users on the iPhone SDK Forum I now have the following action items to take:

• Update app icon to look better and match the application look / colors.
• Rank Higher on Google for particular terms such as “VAT Calculator iPhone”
• Edit the application iTunes Description – mention recent reviews.
• Update this website with more up to date pictures of Calc VAT.
• Create a new video of the application.

There is quite a few actions to do, and hopefully at the end we should start to see the Calc VAT rankings improve.

It would be great if apple in the future provided.

• Analytical data – It would be great to see exactly how buyers find our applications.
• A way to communicate with buyers.

However once I had upgraded XCode to the latest version version, the application would then install on the iPhone but it then gave me a new error which I have not seen before and this puzzled me because the provisioning profile had not expired and was installed correctly.

After much googling i found that it is perhaps a bug with the new version of XCode basically if you have any other provisioning profiles installed which have expired it will stop your new applications from running until you either remove the expired profiles or update them.

As you can see from the picture below I had many profiles installed which have all expired so I deleted these and the new application works fine.