Thursday 19 January 2012

Spending a little time on modern platforms - Reaxion lives on iOS

I haven't forgotten about Reaxion for the Spectrum - but time hasn't been on my side of late, but it's worked out easier to grab the odd moment here and there to put together a bit of C++ in windows. Problem is what I actually want to do is a smartphone game.

What I now have is a small lightweight openGL-based framework running that massages windows events into a format similar to those that come from iOS, and provides just enough primitive functions to allow image loading, screen drawing and timing to be handled in a way that is abstracted from the bulk of my game code. Once I had this running under windows it was a small matter of porting this little chunk of code to IOS, merging the 2 projects into a common folder structure and this was the result:



Now I have the advantage of being able to grab the odd minute that I find in front of a PC with visual studio installed to write and debug the game code, and then I can throw it all back onto my main machine and build for iOS. There are a few sacrifices in the way I've done this - multitouch isn't supported, I need to stub out gamecentre functions in the windows build and my current code is less than optimal, but it means I can hopefully get proof of concept games stuff done much quicker.

I'm currently using 'Reaxion' as a testbed for this, but I'm still undecided about releasing it...