tdog.blog

So there we were at iPhone DevCamp Austin (an official satellite of the iPhone DevCamp going on in San Francisco), trying to come up with a nice little app we could put into the Hackathon Contest for the weekend. The idea is, could we, a bunch of iPhone noobs, code something up in a weekend and submit it by Sunday at 4pm central?

Well, we were all miserably hot (it was like 104 degrees outside, with 20 developers crammed into a room with a Mac Pro and countless MacBooks, and a projector) and feeling a bit spiky about the whole NDA mess (our individual NDAs didn’t allow us to show each other our code or even talk about the iPhone SDK), so Chris Cooley, Steve Stedman and I got together and put together iHrrl.

The game is really simple. There’s a rat in a box. The idea is to agitate the rat so that it gets to a certain level of nausea. Once it gets into the “zone” you start making points. If you stop agitating the rat, the nausea level goes down, as do the points. Agitate the rat too much, and it hurls, game over. Let’s just see who had enough control to score the highest points.

The process broke down like this. Stedman did all the art in Fireworks. Marvelous rat, as you can see from the screenshot. I clarified the initial idea (a rat in the box that you make hurl) into an actual game that required skill, with some outside advice from our friend Joe Licari. I was also put in charge of animating the eyes, limbs, tail, and mouth of the rat. Chris did all the heavy iPhone coding, with me doing a bit of XP-style QA as we neared the deadline.

Now, I can’t talk about how he coded things up, as that would break the NDA. And I’m not sure where the game is posted right now (we emailed it to the committee in San Francisco, who laughed when they played it) so you could see it or play with it (not that you could unless you had an iPhone, as it requires an accelerometer). But take it from me, it’s DAMN funny, especially when the rat hurls.

In any case, now you see what you’re dealing with…a twisted, twisted mind.