So has valentines day really been cancelled in North Korea? Of course not! That was a ploy to get you all over here to tell you the perfect iPhone game for Valentines day which is Yarnaby!

Finally to apologise for the shameless attempt at marketing here are 5 iPhone promo codes of the game for some lucky peeps to enjoy:

9T4LKAJA4J6R
YH47J3NMA7J6
74N3WLH4K74R
JHMXLWJ66WEW
EEP374P3NKNJ

We will be posting an additional two promo codes everyday until we run out. Let us know if you’ve nabbed them. Now click on the link below and enjoy!

We also thought we would make a small list to prepare any indie new comers when entering the App Store.

Prepare for the unexpected!

Whenever you publish on a new platform there are always niggles and extra work that pop up that you may not be expecting. When I created my first game for XBLIG I found out I needed an ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number) so that 30% withholding tax would not be applied to my earnings. This whole process took almost 6 months! Luckily I could still release and get earning on my game but it took me an awful long time to get paid. If I were a full time indie this could have been very damaging.

So here is a little list of dos and don’ts that I hope will help out any new devs out there:

• This one may seem pretty obvious but do some research every store front has it’s own set of rules; there is plenty of documentation and helpful people out there if you need questions answering.
• Decide whether you want to release as a ‘sole trader’ (individual on the App Store) or a company. Both have negatives and positives which I will not delve into here. So go to the tax website of your country of residence and read up on both.
• If you are setting up a company. Register your company name & open up your company bank account well in advance.
• If you are setting up as a company be aware that to get yourself approved on the App Store as a company can take several weeks (It took us 3 weeks but I’ve heard it can take much longer).
• Unless you are in it ‘for the love’ make sure you get your accounts ready. Go fill in the contracts in itunes connect. You may require a EIN or an ITIN and these can take a while to obtain.
• Have your bank details ready. You may be thinking ‘Ha! They are all on my bank card’ but is your IBAN on your bank card?
• Have your description and 5 good screenshots ready as you’ll need these before uploading your binary. I suggest trying to get these done early on as you can always use them in your marketing efforts beforehand.
• Do not put anything in your description that is not in your game/app this can lead to your app being rejected.
• You will need a 512x512px version of your app icon.
• Do not make your 512×512 icon look different to your on device icon. This can lead to rejection.
• Do some keyword research. You are allowed 100 characters for your keywords and you are only allowed to change these if you do an update to your app so chose these wisely.
• Do not put keywords in that your app/game does not adhere to. This can also lead to rejection.

Above is just a small list. You may have come across other issues or you may want me to elaborate more on the points above. If so just leave a comment below.

We are making some minor tweaks and are looking for some testers on testflightapp.com to help us out. We haven’t been able to test on iOS 5 or the iPhone 4S yet. Also anyone with an old 3G or iPod touch 2nd generation would be useful. So any testers with devices matching these specifications would be ideal.

If you would like to help us test head over and sign up.

Yarnaby icon

While we are here we would also like to share the start page for our game. We may make small amends to this but it will give you an idea of what it will look like.

Yarnaby title screen

Let us know what you think!

Fed up of the long development time I wanted to jump onto something I knew I could create quickly. I wanted to do a string/wall avoidance game for mobile devices. I started by creating my string character as I thought this would be the hardest part. I then proceeded to add some collision detection. After these were sorted I just needed a quick way of creating levels.

Below is a screenshot of a level built early on for the Yarnaby project using 16×16 tiles and collision detection.

Yarnaby game screenshot

I put together a very basic tiled based level editor that would create Lua files with tiles and a collision layer. After this it was plain sailing and I could churn out levels in a matter of minutes.

Having a level editor and a game that you still enjoy playing after multiple tests runs can be hugely motivational. The hardest part in this project seemed to be completing other functions like menus and option screens. These ‘boring’ tasks seems to get a lot of developers demotivated and can lead to projects never being completed. I plan on creating these first with my next project. This should help with project flow and forward planning.

If you’d like to see the game character and the opening screen for our game head over to our Facebook page.

Behold ‘untitled project’ being built using the Corona SDK. The game is a Ragdoll based physics game. I came up with the idea while working through some Flash Box2D examples. At that point I had yet to choose an engine to write my first iOS project in. I ended up doing a crazy amount of research which meant I was building prototypes using a vast array of different technologies. I first started with Phonegap and Titanium  because I was already familiar with HTML, JavaScript and CSS.  After modifying some online JavaScript game engines and compiling for device. I found that they ran painfully slow on mobile devices.

ragdoll game

I then turned to Flash after hearing about the Adobe Air iOS packager. With an amazing flash community already out there and brilliant game engines like Flixel and FlashPunk. I was very excited! Sadly at the time the Air 2 packager was also very slow (I’ve heard it’s much faster now).

So the search continued and I stumbled across the Corona SDK. It had a solid community and plenty of examples for me to learn from. The language it uses is called LUA (which then gets compiled into native iOS code). Although I had never coded in LUA before it bore a lot of similarities to flash AS2 and JavaScript, so I wasn’t completely lost. I decided to port over my ragdoll code from Flash into LUA. This was a pretty painless affair and I actually had something similar to what you see above in no time. I had no movement code yet so the ragdoll was just falling with the weight of gravity  when the level loaded.

When looking into controlling the character was when I first came across issues in the physics engine. I wanted to hit the ragoll with an object to make it move. I found that if I wanted to hit the ragdoll with a high velocity the ragdoll’s limbs would tear apart. The same thing occurred when the ragdoll hit walls and other objects.

A lot of people have moaned about the Box2D implementation for the Corona SDK (although they are still making improvements). I eventually made all the objects in my level dynamic and kept them in place with a anchor.

Creating a physics based game where every level has different physical objects and scenarios ( canons and water to name a couple) definitely wasn’t the best idea to have as a first game! I had been mislead by the prototypes I had built and after around 6 months of development (I work full time so 6 months could just equate to 2 weeks!) I decided to move onto building a simpler game.

I don’t like to leave projects half finished (or 70% if you want the actual figure) but with the help of a level editor my second iOS game is almost complete in just 3 weeks and I hope to release early January 2012.

My next post will be on the positives of Corona when choosing the correct project…

Take a look at the PlayStation SUITE introduction at GDC 2011:

I will write a post on the tools I am currently using in the next few days and will give you a comparison against PlayStation Suite once I have built some samples using it.

I currently have two iOS games in development with one very near completion and the second being around 70% complete. I will soon be posting screenshots and details on both projects so stay tuned.

I will still be keeping my @indiexna twitter account for development purposes but will now also have an @anefiox account for company/game release news.

Also the end of my indiexna.co.uk domain does not mean I will not continue to release XNA games on the Xbox 360. I believe that one of my current iOS projects would port over quite nicely.

So feel free to follow me on twitter and I will provide a link to my Facebook page when it is ready.