Months passed with new features and constant improvement. At the end of this week, I want to submit a first version to the public. I proposed this to Friday, but do not know, how much time the review-process of the App-Store will take into account. The feature set is basic, but with the “Send .png per e-mail”-function, it is possible to integrate works made with Smoove to any workflow, just by having a valid e-mail adress.

The release will be V0.4 and the initial price is 2.99 Dollar / 2,39 Euro. Future updates are free, and there will be a lot. In an incremental fashion.

PS: The pixels on the screenshots made by scnclr.de.

Once again did not meet the release-deadline. This made me to switching the development mode. Still I want to stay lean and agile, but at the same time also tight deadlines should be no problem at all. There is a solution to this: Kanban. The goal is to “limit work in progress“. To achieve this goal, workpackages get smaller and faster done. I made the switch some days ago, and it’s really useful! By the way: my original deadline was far away from being realistic at all, just wanted to get into the groove of ultra-ultra-tight deadlines.

With Kanban now I have one internal release every Friday. The first feedback from my own Kanban is, that I totally underestimated the task of “figuring out things” at the iPhone SDK. This SDK is huge and I spend lot of time with stuff like “how to do this” or experiences I get by try-and-error. For example: UITabBarItems are unable to show colored pictures -> UISegmentControl does this, TabBar-Items just love greyscale!

More cool resources on lean, agile and Kanban I found at agile.soup.io.

Stay lean, stay happy!

Oh boy, I am entering the most difficult phase of production: the initial version is about to be completed. Most of the time in the development I spend with other things than designing the app. It was mostly about developing tasks like reading files, writing files, flipping views.. All that dull tasks, that had to be done anyway. And it really seems, that only last days of the schedule (now) is there to actually “design” interaction and that kind of things I have in my mind for weeks. Things, that keep stressing me, is the balance of the first release: are there enough features in the editor to not bug the first buyers and testers? Or will it make sense to improve and add features, at the price of delaying the release again? At least updates will be for free (unless there is some really major changes going on). The more incremental kind of developing would not to delay, but to release. I will beforehand grab some testers anyway…

My design 
A contribution from mo.

I refreshed the Smoove Logo a little bit. After years, sometimes a little bit of polishing is fun. I am still thinking about replacing the rabbit by another animal, but still not sure about that. There is still a lot of work on this project, to get the first release done - but the wait will be worth it! Wait and see for your progress upon that.

Ok. Finally I gave the second work-in-progress game a name: Fargo! Gameplay will be between boulder-dash, interactive-stuff like physics-based games or Lemmings. Hm, and also some puzzle elements of other games. We like to mix it up!

Here is some early screenshot, but things will change nevertheless.

You can follow the progress at twitter. Keyword #fargogame.

Okay, agile development got it’s own pace. I somehow abandoned the works on “Satans Sanctuary” for now and head straight into iPhone development as well. Working on the tiles of two titles: Blackpond Fighter and some sort of Boulderdash for the iPhone. Do prototyping in Flixel - uh no… to be exact… not prototyping, but tracer code. Essential difference. Read “The Pragmatic Programmer” to get it.

Here I share one very first “concept art” of Blackpond Fighter. You can follow the progress also a little bit on twitter: #blackpondfighter.