iOS Games

I've been making games and apps for iOS since Apple released their SDK sime time around 2008.

My first game was Cowabunga. Originally it was written in Obj-C. Back then there weren't any game specific frameworks let alone SpriteKit. I would use NSImageView's for sprites. It was a bit hackish but it worked very well for this type of game.

Soon after I discovered Cocos2D and jumped right on it. I quickly ported the game to C++/Obj-C mix with that framework. From that point on all my games were written with Cocos2D until SpriteKit was released. The transition to SpriteKit was pretty seamless since SpriteKit is basically mimicking Cocos2D.

The games started to gain traction almost right away. By October 2008 two games; Soccer Kickoff and Cowabunga were in the top 100 free. Aerolite, an Asteroids shooter, was in the top free Arcade category.

Aerolite got a good review in Touch Arcade. That was fun. 😁

My biggest app was Fish Food Frenzy Free. In 2009-2010 it had around 10 Million downloads which at that time was pretty decent.

Below is a screenshot of my old developer dashboard. You might notice that all the games have been removed. Updating them from legacy code, especially the Swift coded games, would take to much time. A lot has changed since iOS 1-7.

I'm in the process of rebuilding/reimaging them. I'm porting them over to HTML5/PWA so the games can be played indefinitely without the worry of Apple deciding to pull them because they're too old.

This also affords me the luxury of bring the games to multiple platforms. I wrote custom native wrappers for iOS and Android (though the Android version is outdated now in 2022). The wrapper solution worked great.