I wish all days were like this

Today was a good day. I've coded virtually non stop since 10 this morning till now, just before 2am. I got bored of music and have been "watching" TV all day. When I say watching I mean I've been watching TV i've seen so many times before it's just background noise. I started with Top Gear, then QI then a Mythbusters marathon.

I got some bad news today. A company I worked for up until May last year has just closed it's doors and is dropping all the staff that don't want to relocate to head office. I've got some good friends working there and there's a lot of people without jobs as from next month. I of course don't technically have a job either so I know how they feel. I'm lucky that I have the means to try this for a few months before I need to look for a new job.

Anyhoo, today I got the grid movement finalised. It all moves lovely in all directions now. I've added the systems to handle the items on the grid that you have to match up and got one of the game modes working. I've added a level system and a state machine to handle the game modes.

I also looked up video playback so I can get all the interlevel animations going. I was very sad to find out that movie playback on iPhone is a full screen or nothing kind of thing. No rendering to a surface or a texture. And it even fades the screen to and fro from the video so you can't even transition into a game level seamlessly. I'm going to have to use a mixture of video and sprite animation to get what I need. Bummer.

I've also been thinking about the schedule for this little project today. I think I need to get it in to Apple submission by Feb 1st. This gives me 19 days or 14 more work days. This seems possible but there's still a lot to do. I expect to get all of the game modes working by the end of this week. However I then need all of the menu screens, the transition screens, the in game animations and nice bits and then testing. It may be pushing it a bit. 

Does anyone fancy being a tester?

I've been told that Apple take 10 ish days to approve the game before it goes live. Hopefully they won't find any faults. I've also been thinking of a price point. I originally thought the 99c (59p) price mark was the obvious one but I really ought to do some research on game pricing. I still suspect I'll release it at 99c. I also need to do research into "Lite" versions and if they mean more overall sales.

Then there's advertising. I need to set up my website so there's at least a web page for the game. The flash game's web page will also get a link to the iPhone version. I also need to submit it to the relevant review sites and magazines (are there magazines for iPhone games?)

Hmmm, not as optimistic anymore!