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Dev-Log: Interstellar Force Pt.1 (iPhone & iPod)

Posted on 08. Mar, 2011 by admin in AV-Log, Featured

Interstellar Force by David Molnar Productions

Side scrolling space shooter of intergalactic proportions

Fight an endless number of aliens across the galaxy and on distant planets.

THE DETAILS

The words

David Molnar is about to go live with his first app ‘Interstellar Force’. We caught up with him and threw a few questions his way.

In Part One we get to find out about David as a developer, his thoughts and process for this app. Part 2 tomorrow will cover game specifics.

AppVader: How did you make your way to becoming a developer?

David Molnar: I was there when video games hit it big in the early 80s.  I was fascinated by them and spent all of my weekly allowance on them at Fun-N-Games, our local arcade in Wayne New Jersey where I grew up.  My best friend had the Atari 2600.  I wanted one too but instead my parents bought me the Texas Instruments TI99/4A home computer.

I taught myself BASIC programming in the TI.  BASIC on the TI994A was very slow so I wasn’t able to make much of a game but I did make some cool animations and other simple programs.

Flash forward to the early 90s.   I did a lot of embedded C programming in my first job but the idea of game development didn’t come to me until I got my first iPhone, the 3G several years later.  I had an uphill battle when I started to learn coding for the iPhone.  I was fairly fluent in C programming but unfamiliar with object oriented programming let alone the cryptic Objective C.  For the next 6 months I read everything I could about iPhone development and Objective C

AV: So what was is the concept behind ‘Interstellar Force’

DM: I wanted to create a game that had the same feel as the games I grew up playing.  I loved Defender and Scramble at the arcade.  As for my TI99/4A, Parsec was my favorite.  In school we had the Apple II where I played Repton a lot when I wasn’t using the Apple for schoolwork.  The idea was to make a side scrolling space shooter for my new iPhone.  This idea became Interstellar Force.  I started development of the game in January 2010 and finished in March 2011.

AV: What framework did you use to build Interstellar Force?

DM: After learning the innards of iPhone development and Objective C I started to code Interstellar Force. Searching the web for game development articles I came across Cocos2D.

Cocos2D is an open-source framework for 2D game development on the iPhone. The Cocos2D community was full of great enthusiastic people with all kinds of tips and coding ideas. I couldn’t have developed Interstellar Force without Cocos2D.

The nice thing about developing for the iPhone is that the only tools I needed were my iPhone and my Macbook Pro. I could sit outside and code if I wanted to and I found myself coding the game on several vacations. Since I have a day job, most of the game was developed during the nights and weekends.

Watch out tomorrow for Part 2 of this Dev-Log: Interstellar Force. In the meantime, follow David on his twitter account.

Tags: David Molnar Productions, iPhone, iPod, retro, Sci-fi, Shooter, Space

Reviewed by: admin

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