Corey Ogburn

These are exciting times! As an assignment at school, we are writing an iPhone game. It's a simple number guessing game. You know how it goes... Generate a random number, get the user's guess at the number, tell them "too high" or "too low." When the user guesses it right, you tell them how many guesses it took. It's actually one of the most boring games you can play, but it's a great beginning for learning a framework (and in the iPhone's case, a language, too). It has all the great aspects of a first app: input from the user, output to the user, and simple processing with a nice added bonus of learning how to randomly generate a number. I worked hard to do things right. I wanted it to rotate properly, stay centered, respond well to all input, the usual goals. I wanted a market worthy app, even though it'll never make it to the App Store or the Android Marketplace. All the specifications my teacher inparted on us for the iPhone app, I continued to uphold for my own Android project. I'm going to do my best to explain my experiences with both platforms. I have the same experience with both of them. About a month ago I wrote a Hello World app for each of them. School got in the way of looking into either of them deeper, until this assignment. I may seem pre-determined to be better at Android considering my Java history, but I'm accounting for it by saying that I haven't worked in java for years and that I'm currently getting three hours a week being taught iPhone dev and Obj-C. It evens out enough for me! This article will not be as much a walkthrough as it will be a comparison between my two experiences.

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Advice, Android, Case Study, Development, iPhone iphone, android, xcode, eclipse, interface builder, game

Over the Summer, I noticed a peculiarity on a section of a website that many people frequently visit that contains a lot of personal information about me as well as all its other users. Upon further inspection, it was a weakness in the site's authentication. For the record, I would not be posting this if the site had not already fixed these problems. This lead me to investigate what of my information is made available through these exploits. I was driven to find out because MY information was available and you always assume that if you can exploit it, anybody can.

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Case Study, Computer Security security, research, example, internet

To fill up what little spare time I have, I've started a new project. Nothing ground shattering, I'm not curing cancer or solving the traveling salesman problem in O(n) or anything important like that, but who doesn't love a good Tower Defense game? My favorite TD has always been Bloons Tower Defense, and while playing it, I can't help but think about how I would do things from a development point of view on the back-end of the game. What tower designs would I come up with? How would I design the path(s) on a level? What creature/enemy/bloon design would I have crawling that path? Could I twist the game with a new rule or concept added in? Could it be made into a head to head multiplayer style game? My mind is flooded with the possibilities of what to include in the game! I'll be keeping track of my progress as I go and I'll post everything along with the end result at the same time, source code and all. I've already started developing fundamental aspects to the game. You can place points to draw a path and little dots currently crawl the path before disappearing at the final point. Exciting I know, but you have to walk before you crawl and crawl before you kill it with a tower.

This is my first Tower Defense game to ever make so we get to walk the path together when I finish writing up the whole article for you. The design process is moving along and today I plan to talk specifications with my lead art designer (my buddy Brice) about what visual themes we want to give the game, he'll definitely be in charge of that. I plan to go over details such as how I'm going to track of a path for the enemies, what strengths/weaknesses to give my towers/enemies, what choices I give the player, how difficulty settings change gameplay, the money and points systems, and every detail I can come up with down to the name of the project (currently undecided). I don't have too many things set in stone, yet. All I can promise is that it's going to be in C# and optimistically take a good two or three weeks. I'm sure you'll hear back from me before it's done, though. This is the first of many case study programs I'll be doing so don't forget to come back and check out what's available.

C#, Case Study, Development tower defense, game, design