You must be wondering why this blog is titled "rendezvous to iOS game development". Because that’s what it is for me. Welcome to my rendezvous! In my day job I manage a midsize team of networking professionals specializing in infrastructure support. I myself would be considered an infrastructure specialist with expertise in Network Operating Systems, Networking Devices, Security Devices (Firewalls), Messaging Platforms, DNS and DNSSEC architecture. Just a short list from my fifteen years of experience in technologies completely different from iOS game programming!
So this is to me a rendezvous into a land that I am vaguely beginning to map out in my brain. You see, it takes time for your brain to get accustomed to new knowledge patterns. And programming is, I would say, something that is about patterns (design patterns anybody?). To be honest, I have, over the years, dabbled in programming. Nothing serious. A script here and there in Perl, Ruby. For many years I had trouble with OOP (Object Oriented Programming) concept. What’s ironic is that I learned about OOP while taking up Objective-C for iOS rather than scripting in Ruby (which is I would say the best for learning OOP). Maybe it was Stephen Kochan’s style in his book Programming in Objective-C? God knows.
But learning a language is completely different from actually coding in it. And I am sure most programmers would agree. So I started dabbling in iOS about couple of years back. It’s been on and off since then with no serious attempt to publish an app on a personal level. I did help publish a game app called iBridgeonline on the app store that I did not code. This is my third attempt to try to code and publish a simple game and I thought I should go to the fundamentals of the technology just like what I do in my day job and the technologies I deal with over there. You may ask why now? I guess its just an itch to do something else. Scratching this itch is may way of satisfying my intellectual curiosity I guess.
So in this blog I am going to start the journey by wading through Mat Buckland’s excellent book (at least so far) Programming Game AI by Example. The book has the source code on the product page and also the author maintains a website for the book. Its a dated website but still quite relevant.
One of my objectives is to port the C++ code of the book to Objective-C. That is in itself a challenge since C++ is such a bloated language feature vise (at least to a C++ newbie like me). Some of my travails through understanding C++ code just enough to port would also be part of this blog. My expectations are that the readers of this blog will have some understanding of OOP, Objective-C or are just entering into these topics and are interested in iOS programming. But if any of my readers would like me to go a little deeper into any of the topics my blog breaches, I would be glad to.
I am sure others may have ported the code to the book. In fact I am aware of one such blog which has some of the Chapter 2 code. But my goal is to ignore them for now (maybe I will peek!) and try to port the code by myself. If I am successful in porting all of the code of the book and I am confident with my programming skills, my journey into game development will continue and this blog will witness that. I am praying that I do not lose interest on the way, since that’s the biggest bane of my past endeavors, and hoping to find encouragement from readers that will keep me chugging along.
