iPhone Proposition

Good friend and esteemed peer Skitch contacted me the other day requesting we meet at DeVry. I seldom get a call from him, so I was quite intrigued. As it happens, he has been working on games for the iPhone with a small local outfit, but he's more than a bit dissatisfied with the job, and he met with me to discuss a business venture into the same feild. Now, I'm not sure just how solid it is yet, but I told him I'm up for it because, in fact, I am.

The idea is to continue in the feild he's been in, developing games for the iPhone, which can apparently be pretty lucrative if it's done right. Just based on the available inputs on the device I'd say there's a lot of potential for entertaining, casual games which are addicitive enough to be worth a couple bucks but easy enough to put down that you can play them on the train.

All iPhone apps are written in Objective C, which is very similar to C from what I understand, and are made with a special, all-inclusive and surprisingly intuitive SDK, which unfortunately can only be run on Mac OS X 10.7 or greater. This would mean that we would both require a form of Mac (a Mac mini is avaiable, with student discount, for $545, the cheapest possible solution) and at least one iPhone between the two of us, as the SDK comes with an emulator.

Scott was talking about getting the business aspects worked out, Trademarking Awe+ Games and such, opening a business bank account and getting a business loan for the hardware, which is all important I guess, as I suppose there isn't much more we need to look into before moving ahead. As I said, I'm not 100% this is going to come through yet, but I'm hoping for it. The innovation possible with the iPhone's controls are quite exciting.

In other, unrelated news, Team Playground will be meeting for the first time since our GSP360 class ended this coming Tuesday, and we'll see how serious we are. I might be working on two indie teams at once, which is more than fine by me.