Sun 09 Dec 2018

Making a Mobile App – Chapter 1: A Few False Starts

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

Douglas Adams

Self-learning is often like trying to solve a maze, you follow the first path you see as far as you can. You reach a dead end. Then use what you learned in that path to give you an idea of where you could go next.

I’ve been trying to find a new small project for a while now. I lacked the enthusiasm to spend time making games as I generally find it is something you need to take a running jump at with a fresh idea and be able to maintain that flair through the tidal wave of texture drawing, physics calculations and gameplay design. At some point I will go back to game development but I wanted something new.

It was around this time that the opportunity came up to develop an app that may or may not be used for a local business. It had the vague deadline that let me experiment but gave me the pressure to finish it, it let me design something that was professional and would have to be used practically and it was something I’d never done before on a platform I had never developed for.