The game is about about keeping a ball in the air. The more often you hit the ball the harder it gets and the more visual effects motivate you to keep trying. The audience is also getting louder. If you reach 25 hits the first firework is launching.

The limit is 400 hits. At this score the sensitive area the ball reacts to is not existent anymore. Plus the gravity and the horizontal deflection is increasing. My goal was to have an easy entry for people who are no pro gamers. So the game is very easy if you begin. But it is getting harder an harder. So pro gamers score are not that far away from the beginners which might motivates the beginners trying to get better.

Another nice feature is the feedback you get if you beat your own high score. The app compares your score with the last 1000 submits of other players and tells you which position you reached. The good thing with this approach is that you always have a relative comparison of your score. Even if 100.000 people are playing every day. With a real leaderboard your ranking would decrease with the number of people playing.

After 5 days in the App Store there are now 4500 entries in the database. After one year there are over 600.000 entries in the database.

Download the game and check it out!
If you like the game I would appreciate it very much if you write a short review. Thanks.

Cheers,
Raphael

I bought two books. One is for diving into Objective-C and the other one is about the iPhone SDK. It worked out to be a good idea having two books. One for Objective-C basics and the other one more iPhone specific. Although the iPhone book is my favourite book, you need to have basic knowledge about Objective-C to understand what they are doing there.

This book: Beginning iPhone Development is really good. Every chapter contains a Step by Step tutorial on a specific theme. It’s really fun reading and everything is really easy explained.

The second book called Programming in Objective-C is ok but it’s nothing special. It’s not bad though. It’s just a usual book about a programming language. If you consider buying this book better buy this one: “Programming in Objective-C 2.0″. Or a completely different one.

So I started reading the Objective-C book. If you are familiar with ActionScript everything seems different to you. How you declare variables, call functions, handle events and a lot more. Tracing! So simple in ActionScript. And a good example for a comparison:

What is that?! Some things are really strange. And I’m not into it that much that I could say: “Ok, it is a little bit odd but actually it is better because … “. So I just accepted it

Even if it is a little bit painful for me leaving the comfortable ActionScript enviroment it is a lot fun starting with iPhone programming. You simply have access to data you normally don’t have in ActionScript. Think of things like multitouch, accelerometer, GPS location, access to the adressbook of the user and a lot more.

So I started developing a really simple game. I think it is always good if you set yourself a goal to achieve. My goal is to develop a simple football game. The concept is pretty easy. You kick a ball and have to keep in the air. The longer you keep the ball in the air the higher the score. The score is to be saved in a database later.

I read the iPhone book and Keith Peters tutorial about gravity on the iPhone. And i watched some videos on this site: www.iphonedevcentral.org.

This is the current state. Unfortunately it doesn’t run that smooth on the iPhone. The difference between the X-Code-Simulator and the runtime on the iPhone is pretty big. I guess I should do the movement with openGL. Another language I don’t know. But the book is already ordered Have a look for yourself: