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So it begins.. [Ninja vs Robots]

I’ve been messing around in xcode lately playing with some iPhone development, getting myself comfortable with the editor, objective-c and the Cocos2d library in preparation for some serious game development. After a few weeks of kicking the tires I think I’m comfortable enough to start working on a real game, so tonight I sat down to go over the ideas I’ve been kicking around to pick one.

Picking one idea out of the five or so in my head, knowing what a huge commitment it is to finish a game, is a bit daunting. After much back and forth, pros and cons, I decided to just sit down with flash and start sketching some things out. Almost immediately this little guy popped out: (go ahead and hit the play button to see some crazy ninja action)

So, Ninja vs Robots (tentative title) it is. As of right now the basic plan consists of a side-scrolling free-roaming platformer (Metroid style) with some story to it and hopefully some fast-paced and interesting game play. This is going to be slow going, I’ve got a lot of other stuff on my plate and this’ll be a background thing, but expect to see something, oh I don’t know, sometime in 2011? Well, hopefully sooner than that, but you know how it is. It’s ambitious - I thought about doing a more casual game at first - but I know the types of games I want more of on my iPhone and this is it, so I’m going to skip the casual game phase and jump right into what gets me all happy.

I’ll post little updates here as I flesh out the concept more and start putting some gameplay together on the iPhone itself.

Copying Music from an iPhone to your Mac

It’s no secret, I love my iPhone. But sometimes it seems like Apple just does things to piss me off. Take for example the fact that you can only sync music from a single computer to an iPod/iPhone. There is no way to copy music from multiple computers to your iPod, and no way to get that music from your iPod to your computer. You can’t even play music from a connected iPod through iTunes unless it’s the single machine you’re syncing to.

This is rediculous. I assume it’s to prevent piracy, but it’s the most asinine copy protection I’ve ever encountered. I mean, they already have DRM, and there’s nothing preventing me from copying my music from iTunes onto a flash drive and then onto another computer, so how exactly does it protect the industry to prevent me from using my iPhone as my main music library? Fair play my ass.

If you’re using a mac then the beta version of Senuti (http://www.fadingred.org/senuti) will transfer music from your iPod or iPhone and add them to iTunes on any machine. It sucks that you have to get a third party app to do this simple task, but it seems to work and it’s very easy to use, if a little slow to copy.