Maybe you’ve heard Radstronomical and I dropping cryptic hints on Twitter about a “super secret project” over the last few months. We know you’ve been absolutely dying for some juicy details about what this project could be, and today we’re happy to oblige.

Since January, Diego and I have been meeting every Sunday (frequently much more often) to pound out an iOS game of our own imagining. We’re calling it Heads Up! Hot Dogs, an “all-beef action frankfest” in which you must save hot dogs from certain doom by tossing them onto the noggins of unsuspecting passers-by, all to the rad tunes of Knife City and Space Boyfriend. The game is in private, invite-only beta right now, and we plan to release in the iOS app store before we’re both back in school for the fall.

Go check out the promo page at Heads Up Hot Dogs dot com!

The process of developing this game since January has been and continues to be an incredibly important learning experience, in many different respects. Most obviously, I’ve had to deal with the challenges of embarking on a project of this scale with a Python background and only one month of prior iOS development experience. When we started working on Heads Up, I was forgetting to initialize my struct pointers and wondering why my app was segfaulting. Given that, this may be troubling to many developers out there, but the other day I gave a small workshop to some fellow HackNYers on how to use the technologies that I use for Heads Up; I see this progression as some indication of how much working on this game has taught me, about iOS, game development, and being a better pragmatic programmer. The lessons I’ve had to learn along the way about time management and cooperative decision making have also been ones that I’d never been exposed to before this project.

I don’t want to make it sound in any way like I feel that this project is over. It’s being beta tested and improved upon constantly for the next few months, and then we’re releasing at the end of the summer/beginning of fall. Beyond that, I continue to have an incredibly rewarding experience working with Diego on games, and we plan to continue creating together after Heads Up! Hot Dogs. Seeing his sprites move and play as a result of my code is a rare experience, and I’m honored to have such a talented and dedicated partner.

Now that we’re public about Heads Up, I plan to make a few more short blog posts about my past and present experiences as I continue to learn through its development. You can find them right here.

Thank you for playing!