Chubby Buddy: Ready for Beta Testing

I'm happy to announce that Chubby Buddy is one step closer to its release!

Concretely, the game is ready for beta testing, which I expect to finish by next week. During that time, the game will be tested by some colleagues from which I expect to receive the feedback to completely remove uncomfortable bugs.

As a bonus, it's my pleasure to introduce you to Chubby Buddy-style avatars of the creators of the game: Manuela and I. When the game is out, look for them and click them if you dare!

See you very soon!

FM

On Delays

Wow! It's been very (too) long since the last post. I must admit that I'm a bit ashamed. Not only did it take me too long to update the blog, but Chubby Buddy has also taken me longer than expected!

Precisely, the last-hour rush in the development of Chubby Buddy has been the primary cause for the hiatus of the blog. If in this previous entry I reflected on the importance of setting deadlines, in this entry I want to put the stress on the importance and difficulties in making an accurate scheduling.

A good strategy when you've gone off schedule is to analyze the reasons that led you astray. In my case, the reasons have been the following, listed from more to less relevance in my opinion:

1. Underestimated effort for universal app.
2. Few experience with the framework.
3. Underestimated effort for additional features support.
4. Not so much commitment during Christmas.
5. Few experience with the language.

We wanted to achieve an universal app that worked under different versions of iPhones and iPads, but this involved re-doing all the art in the game to adjust to different screen resolutions, and also make some adjustments at the code level to support these different versions. This entails a good amount of work and I definitely underestimated the required effort.

Even when Cocos2D is enjoyable and usable, it is a new framework that imposes certain rules and it is not always obvious how to accomplish some functionality. After a bunch of lines of code, I needed to check Stackoverflow or the Cocos2d forums to figure out how to achieve something new. 

In the last minute, Manuela and I thought about adding a couple of new features that supposedly wouldn't entail lots of effort; we were wrong. However, we think that the final result makes up for this extra-effort.

For several reasons, our dedication to the game during Christmas holidays was not as high as I had expected. Had we worked as initially planned, the game would have been released much earlier.

Finally, even when Objective-C is a really easy to grasp language, it presents a couple of differences with Java or C/C++, languages which I'm much more used to work with. 

It only remains to try the best in order to keep up the pace!

FM