Kanami proved that I was able to make apps for the iPhone. Now I wanted to push my personal limits a bit further…

What next?

First of all – I wanted to do something entirely different.

As I am a geocacher, I already had lots of ideas about apps based on providing content depending on your location. For example; socially tagging stories to places, which would be revealed only when you got there. Games which would be based on your and co-player locations, and such… I also toyed with the idea of making YASA (= Yet Another Social App), but soon found out the obvious: Who needs yet another social app?

Both of the previous would also require a mi-own server. (In my daytime job, I have built quite many systems with magic happening on the backend, so the thought was tempting). I would also need a secure plan of how to scale the service if it suddenly had millions of users. And monitor that the servers are actually up and running… No thanks at this point. Too much with my time available.

A Game it will be.

While writing Kanami, I kind of got curious what else was there for iDeveloper to use? I mean – Apple UIKit is nice, but let’s be honest – you don’t want to write anything but simple dialog / menu / tab bar apps with it. A little googling (search for libraries, frameworks & such for iPhone), led me to the cocos2d. Finding it (and chipmunk to go with) pretty much sealed it – A game it will be.

BOUNCE inc. happens

It had been quite a while since I last wrote a game… 14 years to be exact...

While still making Kanami V1, I spent the evenings for few weeks reading tutorials and toyed with the framework and the libraries. My first goal was to make a skeleton end-to-end app I always start with, which would be built by the cocos2d customs. After a few more evenings learning the crafts, I suddenly had a working bare bone game running on the iPhone Simulator screen, which looked very much like this (I’ve just added the arrows & descriptions for your convinience).

My first impressions were: A blast from the past. OMG, it’s Nintendo Game & Watch all over again. But this time recharged with up-to-date physics engine, speed and control.

BOUNCE inc happened. I never chose it, it chose me. In a way it’s my show of respect to the games I used to play when I was a kid at the eighties. At that time, the coolest things on earth were Commodore 64, Mattel Intellivision – and the before those, Nintendo Game & Watch, for which BOUNCE inc owes a lot. I loved the simple, yet addictive gameplay they gave us. They had heart.