I’m not normally one to set myself a New Years resolution (in fact I don’t think I ever have before), but this year I’m doing it. What has inspired me is an email that I received from Apple telling me that my App was being taken off sale. I can’t blame them for doing it as it was first published back in Feb 2012 and has only been updated twice (I think), both times in the first year. It now no longer runs properly on newer devices and as such is pointless being on sale. Now I’m actually quite happy that Apple have done this as it has given me the kick up the bottom that I need to stop mucking about and actually do something.
So, my New Years resolution that I have made is that this year I will try not to procrastinate as much and will complete, and publish, at least 3 games to the App Store.
My first one is going to be a complete re-write of my first game “StopIt!”. There are a number of reasons that I want to completely rewrite it.
When I first wrote it I was new to Corona and the last programming I had done prior to that was in Turbo Pascal at college back in the mid 90’s. As such the code is not good. At all. I have been looking through the source and every few minutes I’ve been thinking “What the hell does that do??”, or “Why the flip did I do that like that?”. There are functions that (as far as I can see) never get called, variables/functions with names like “booyaka” and “flemnipod”, and, of course, there are no comments.
I have made a start and already have a playable prototype running, albeit with no title/menu and gameover scenes yet, but what is apparent is that although I am in no way a good coder my ability has improved no end. The new playable version of the game currently runs to 283 lines of code, and I estimate I could get the game finished in approx 1000-1200 lines. That is compared to the original version that ran at 9,202 lines.
So there we have it. It’s now out there in public so please, keep pestering me to see how it’s going and to make sure that I do it.
(Belated) Happy new year everyone.