My current side projects: Game development in iOS and Android development with Kotlin

For “Get Your Game On”, my recent presentation at the Tampa iOS Meetup, which I run with mobile designer extraordinaire Angela Don, I put together a “Frogger”/“Crossy Road”-style game. I’ve continued tweaking it and have got the basic game mechanics up to the point where I’m pretty pleased with how they’re working. Now comes the hard part: all the polish, which may take a while. Here’s what it looks like on the iOS simulator — it runs a lot more smoothly on an actual device:

I’ve also taken the basic game code from the “Cookie Crunch” tutorial on Ray Wenderlich’s site, updated it to work with Swift 2 (it’s written for Swift 1.2, and won’t work in current Swift without some tweaking) and to make it more my own, and turned it into a game for Aspirations Winery, which I’m hoping to release soon. It won’t make me any money, but it’ll help fatten my App Store portfolio, and it’s already landed me lots of free wine:

And finally, on the Android front, I’ve been giving Kotlin a try. If Java drives you crazy and have wished for am open source, Swift-like language for Android development, the folks at JetBrains (the people behind the so-much-better-than-Eclipse Android Studio) have created the Kotlin programming language, and it’s so much more nicer to program in. There’s so much less “yak shaving”:

Kotlin 1.0 was just released, and you can get the plugin for your preferred Java/Android IDE at the Kotlin site. You can also take it out for a spin at the Try Kotlin page. Give it a try — I think you’ll like it!