The following posts are the daily diary I will maintain throughout this project. The project is a University assignment for my Masters Degree for an iPhone game called DungeonBard and I have decided to keep a diary of the adventures. You’ll see this also appear on the website for my project www.dungeonbard.com

So i have completed a basic prototype of a game. I mean really basic,but it works and its sort of fun in a simplistic retro way. It’s been an interesting few weeks that started out with the usual frustrations of a C# developer starting to work with X-Code and objective C. It’s an experience that is often bemoaned by the .NET developer trying to work in Xcode who ofter refer to the experience as painful and as a “step backwards”. Its an interesting experience and having felt like that in the past with previous unsuccessful attempts with XCode dating back to 2009 – I was a bit concerned. Several days in though things changed. My ability to add functionality to my app and built a simple roguelike came much quicker than I thought it would. Suddenly the semantic issues I had previously struggled with just went away. It just clicked. It just sort of became easier.

I think in truth it had a lot to do with the fact that for the first time I was actually coding in XCode during the day and not trying to squeeze a few hours into a busy weeknight, when I am usually tired and not really able to give 100%. It became fun as well and this probably had a lot to do with the fact that I was building a game.

So today is significant – the prototype though basic works. Like a classic Roguelike you can move your character around the screen or dungeon using NSEW buttons placed on the screen.

At the moment the prototype is very simple but its demonstrated the fundamentals of the game – its the proof of concept and from experience its a really important milestone in any development project. So with this milestone completed I start the serious work of trying to complete this game by early october for UNI but also I am hoping to get this up on the App store.