Jfgeyelin's dev blog

At one point during the development of PewPew, I wanted the players to be able to enter their name for the online high scores and replays. At first I started to use the native iOS keyboard,  and for a couple of months that's all there was. But because I always wanted to have as few OS-specific code as possible to make the porting to different OS as simple as possible, I decided to implement my own keyboard. It was going to be a lot of boring work though, so I kept postponing for later... And then, one day, I got in  I saw this: Extract from Gunnm , a fantastic manga. I immediately wanted to have this keyboard in PewPew, and two days later it was done. And it looked great: custom keyboard = seamless integration. Besides the speed gain when porting to a new platform and the code simplification, there are many other advantages to having a custom keyboard. PewPew's font does not contain all the characters, so I can show only the characters that...

Quick post to say that I released an update for both PewPew and PewPew 2, that includes a new game mode called Asteroids . It's of course an homage to the classic 1979 game , albeit PewPew style: lots of shooting, and lots of enemies. A few notes: To keep the retro mood going on, the ship's color is forced to white. The asteroids' shape is generated at run time: it was faster for me to write code than to draw manually them :-) Added bonus: they have a unique shape every time. Final note: I resisted the urge of making the asteroids rotate, to stay closer to the original. A game developer's life is tough.