Summer

Summer has been quite hectic for me, I had a lot to deal with at the start including the stress of finding a job so i could have enough money to live. In the end i got quite stressed and ended up doing nothing for the rest of may and most of june. I eventually got a job though which made me even more stressed and it got to the point where I was sleeping all day and only rising to go to work, a lifestyle that was annoying me more because I wasn't doing anything. So I decided to start rebuilding my life and get myself together, first I made sure I had enough money to last me the rest of the summer and left my job. Then I started working on programming properly, every day for a few hours to start with and gradually increasing the amount of time I was working. Now I'm much happier, less stressed and for probably the first time in my life I'm actively working towards a proper goal (outside of term time).

I started off working through C# again and gradually building a working tile engine as well as a menu system including character selection. I'm confident that in another month or so I will be able to make a proper game using C# however, recently another project has taken my attention away from C#. In the last few weeks I have been discussing and planning to make a game with my friend who already has made graphics for games. 

This project will have us launching a game on the iPhone/iPod Touch and as such I have been learning Objective - C. Given the short time I have been working with it, I am very pleased with my progress with the language and this is in no small part to various tutorials I have been using. If you are interested in making apps or games for the iPhone,  I thoroughly recommend the tutorials on www.raywenderlich.com.

Unfortunately, I've only started saving videos of the finished tutorials but the ones I haven't included on here are on my Facebook page and show how much improvement I've made with the help of these tutorials.

Here is a video of a simple defence game where you control the turret and have to stop the monsters of varying difficult from getting to the other side of the screen. Although this does look very simple, it took a few days to make and to properly understand what most of the code does. If there is one thing about objective - C I dislike it's how confusing it can be at times compared to some other languages.

And here is a video of me working with a sprite. I thought it was important that i learn at least the basics of sprite coding as I believe it will be the simplest way to animate our game.

I doubt I'll get round to updating this as often as I would hope as after a few more tutorials on some basics I will be concentrating on trying to build our game and making it the best it can be, after all I do want to try and make some money off this. I shall try and update on the progress of the game as I go but it will depend on how busy I am, otherwise check my twitter or facebook for more up-to-date information on how the project is coming along.

X-Box: IkasuKiller
PS3: Ikasu-Killer 
Steam: ikasukiller
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LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/leighnorton 
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