Pop Fizz is born!

Skip forward to last year, when I discovered that iPhone is actually a cool platform to code against and started playing with it. I ran across Cocos2D and Chipmunk as two independent, community-supported frameworks that made the job considerably easier. Cocos2D is a well-polished set of libraries that abstracts all the OpenGLES goo away from you and gives you a clean interface to manipulate 2D sprites (along with a whole bunch of other goodness). I worked with several other frameworks in the past and I must say I was very impressed and thankful for all the good work that went into it. Similarly, Chipmunk is a simple, but powerful physics engine that takes care of all the physics goo for you so, in the end, all you have to worry about is the game dynamic itself. Here is a big shout out to the Cocos2D and Chipmunk creators and contributors – thank you!

Back to the story, though. I was on a bus from Syracuse to Boston last November. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the route, let’s just say that the trip is a full-day joyride on sketchy inter-urban buses. Fortunately for me, Greyhound just upgraded their buses to have power plugs and WiFi onboard. The WiFi was nonexistent, but the power plugs worked (at least the one at my seat), which gave me whooping 8 hours of uninterrupted computer play during which I was trying to come up with a simple game for the iPhone. This is what I came up with:

A bunch of duplicate symbols on the screen – you match two identical symbols, they pop and disappear from the screen. Simple, but fun (or at least fun enough to make an 8-hour bus ride bearable). Following that trip, I spent two months turning that idea into a game, which eventually became Pop Fizz:

I managed to squeeze in quite a few features into the original idea – three different worlds with their own set of rules each, three different game types within each world giving you nine total game permutations, close to thirty achievements, InApp purchase integration, Twitter support, global leader boards, animated menus, ... you name it. In the end, I was very excited about the result. However, the game didn’t do particularly well. A lot of people downloaded the free version, but only a handful upgraded to the paid one, and eventually Pop Fizz got lost in the sea of other arcade games out there.

The good news was that I solved a lot of common problems (like writing a silly dialog box that allows the user to enter their name – I thought that would be an iPhone freebie, but no…) and I got quite comfortable with the platform and its tools (although there are days when I still curse Xcode’s auto-completion logic or the compiler’s ability to generate warnings but then hiding them from you and claiming success).