Ow My Balls! The game

Another good day of code progress. Slowly learning how to work with UIImageViews in the context of a game. I can’t tell if what I’m doing is a complete hack or the way this is meant to be done. We’ll find out the first time I show this code to someone who knows what they are doing. Ow! My Balls!

I’ve decided to keep a Jing log of the daily progress of the games development. Hopefully that means when we’re all done here I can make a wicked awesome fast movie that shows development.

After six heroing hours we have our first version. Let’s call it 0.01. No no, 0.0.1. That’s the Apple way. Here’s the first video – it’s no science machine, but everyone’s got to start somewhere.

So after some deep thought, the answer to the question of Video or Game is Video Game! We will have a game where you kick a guy in the balls and as you earn more points you unlock videos of people getting hit in the balls. Pretty clever eh? Also pretty complex. This is no iFart or Yo Mama – this is going to take weeks minimum to build. We don’t have much time. Time to get crackin’ on the code.

Step one is to figure out what the hell “Ow My Balls!” is going to actually do. My inclination is always towards finding the simplest possible thing to build. My friends would probabily tell you this is because I suck at coding. I assure you that has nothing to do with it. If someone else comes up with a simpler, faster way to build “Ow My Balls!” we’ll lose out to them in the store. We can’t have that happen again.

After hours of racking my brain the easiest thing that came to mind was a playlist of YouTube videos of people getting hit in the balls. YouTube is full of great ball shot videos, and building an app that embeds a number of them should be easy. But is that really worth 99 cents? I mean I bet that could hit #1 in Free but come on we’re playing in the real game.

So what’s the next easiest thing? Mind is blank. All I can see is a game where you kick a guy in the balls and he hits various things. Extremely complex. Never programmed a game before. Never done animation before. This would be a massive challenge. But an awesome one. We’re going to have to decide today – Video Playlist or Game?

God please save me from writing code.

Today we start on a new journey. This will be the fifth major iPhone project we have undertaken. The first lost out in the fart wars to iFart, which did a noble job defending its turf as fart champion. The second was rejected by Apple with no recourse. The third was rejected by Apple with no recourse. The fourth broke a bone just before the finish line and lost out to “Yo Mama!” And now we are on to the fifth journey.

This journey will be one unlike the past.

It will not end until it is completed.

A few hours ago I posed a simple question to Tim. Fill in the blank: “iFart… Yo Mama… ?” I used to play this computer game all the time where you had to do that with numbers. A lot harder when it comes to apps. My binary mind came up with “42″ but that didn’t make any sense so all the pressure was on Tim. His sick twisted artistic mind locked onto it right away.

“Ow! My Balls!”

And so it begins.