mmmmmmm
i suppose given that it's a real simple game you can get away with that.

Is there any reason (other than speed) why I wouldn't be able to?

probably not. it just seems weird doing it that way

It's because I've never really used CALayers.

Edit: I promise it will get more exciting once you reach the Memory management unit (which is obviously an elephant)

i was wondering where the elephant is...

Don't suppose you have any idea what the inside of a MMU looks like? :P

At the minute the only thing I can think of is a mail sorting centre run by elephants...

I've added accelerometer calibration, made the spider smaller, plus a few other tweaks...

edit: added collisions (you stop when you hit a byte) and the progress bar now works. I still need to animated the destruction of bytes when you hit them (might just scramble them, change their value), make you invulnerable for a while (with flashing) after hitting one and I need to put in the progress counter, speed counter and collision counter (plus some kind of progress reset if you have too many collisions). After all that I can get on with the MMU boss and start to worry about sound.

Another edit: Got the HUD working. Hope to deal with the rest of the collisions stuff today but I don't see where I'll get time to.

More edit: Scratch that, I did it.

wait... so crashing into the bytes that are coming at you is bad because it'll make the elephant more powerful and if you do it too much you'll have to start the trail all over again?

what happens when you reach the end?

If you do it too much you have to start again but I think that limit is going to be quite high, something that very few people will do. The original plan was to make the anti virus program more powerful in the CPU but now I'm not sure...

Once you get to about 60% of the way along the bus you reach the MMU, where you face the elephant and the resulting battle catapults you along the rest of the bus and to the CPU.
Once in the CPU you have to beat up programs for their time slices so you can get executed, whilst avoiding the anti virus program.
I still haven't decided what the anti virus program will look like though.

how do you plan on beating up programs?

With an identity disc of course!

Tron references aside I'm not really sure yet, I thought it might just be a matter of catching them. I thought about being able to spin webs to try and slow them down.
But it would be nice if it sort of made sense in the sense of a computer in a lateral kind of way.....
I'm not even sure what the programs will look like yet...

It's best if you don't ask.

This will be part of the opening movie, I think it will be faster to actually make it then try to explain. XD

I've redone the graphics, I wasn't really liking the pea green effect (I've kept it on the instructions/introduction screen though just for retro fun). I also added the black/white bits at the side and the grey underneath to give a better sense of movement.
I've also done quite a lot of work on the opening movie, but it's not finished yet (that's where the elephant thing comes into (you didn't think I'd make a game without involving elephants in some way did you? :P ).
I'm also thinking of adding something you pick up for points and a multiplier system, where the more you pick up in a row the higher the multiplier gets and if you hit a byte the multiplier goes down. Not sure though. I think I'll try it and see how it works but what could I have as the pick up? What do software spiders eat? Time slices? Bugs?

Edit: I just looked at the start of this thread. Ha, I was aiming for easter?! That was pretty unsuccessful then :giggle: Ah well, school work got in the way, which is probably more important.

i ran your code and it looked like the white bars were jiggling until i went 2x on the iPad.
if those are meant to be electric streams I think you should look at showing it some other way. You know how you can use the lightning effect in Maya? you could do something like that. render out some lightning strikes, make it match the rest of your artwork, and make an image sequence (i think UIImageView can do image sequences)

it's also way too easy to hit the bytes, the spider is pretty wide. imo you should make the spider skinnier than the streams that the bytes are flying along or make the bytes skinnier. Or at least for the first few levels. or perhaps you have some penalty bonus that makes you fat and more likely to collide with the bytes

also, you should rotate your images and shrink them (you can do that in preview)

I haven't updated the 1x graphics yet because I'm still messing with them, that's why it's doing weird things

You're not the first to suggest making it smaller but the thing is the 1x is a small as it can get, so I think I'll have to shrink the bytes (I think I'm going to wish I didn't use literals again :P )

The grey things the move on the background aren't really supposed to be anything, I was just trying to give a sense of movement.

oh, i thought the 2x only affects the iphone4, not the iPad

it's not too late to change the literals to constants or variables!
(60 is just a random number i chose)

you could use little dots and make them appear like they are on the board instead of that graphic to convey movement. or some sort of tiling wires (graphic or programatically drawn)