I decided to port Otis to the iPhone using the new SDK. It’s a little fancier than its Mac-based cousin, as I’ve been using CoreAnimation on it. Here’s a quick demo movie:
Download (.mov, 580KB)
Still needs a little work (nicer graphics, performance optimization, etc), but I think I’m off to a good start. I had the game itself playable on the iPhone in under 3 hours. The rest has just been polish and tinkering.
I think I’ll let the user choose an arbitrary picture from their library for the background. What I’d love to do is have the blocks fall whatever direction the iPhone is facing, to add an additional element of strategy, but then it’d be a different game.
[...] good friends over at wonderwarp has been working to port Otis to the iPhone. Pretty damn cool if you ask me. Now if I could [...]
Looks great! Are the blocks smaller in harder playmodes? They look very big atm.
Nope, there’s just one board size on the iPhone version. It’s hard to make the blocks much smaller without making them too small for a finger to point to.
That looks very nice. Gotta leave a question: I just discovered shove box, wich i fell deeply in love with. But: Are you thininking of porting Shovebox to iphone? Syncing and editing shovebox on iphone would be a damn hot thing! I’d even buy it in advance!
Greetings, ulle-schnulle
I would love to do something with ShoveBox and the iPhone, but I’m still waiting for the APIs to mature a little bit so I can figure out what the best solution would be. Even at this stage, things are changing around.
There isn’t any sanctioned way to access the app sandbox from the Mac, nor any sanctioned syncing mechanism, so I’d probably have to do any syncing over the internet.