The last few months I’ve been working on a small game for the iPad, and it’s finally nearing completion. Naively I decided on making a chess game, since the iPad seemed so well suited for that particular purpose. What I didn’t consider was that chess is a very well established game with some pretty obscure and difficult to handle rules, and that there is a long history of computer chess games that all have had years and years of work put into them.

Perhaps not quite the right thing to start with (should have made a fart app) considering I’ve never programmed for a Mac before. The development environment is new, the language is new, the SDK is new, the device is new. Lets make a game!

Despite things taking a bit longer than I had hoped, it is turning out to be quite the nice little product, and I’m pretty proud of having managed to do it all pretty much on my own. It’ll be incredibly sweet to finally see it up in the app store!

More information on the game, screenshots and video and all that hype will soon start appearing on the ohm interactive blog, a site me and a friend started as a kind of software collective for anything that we produce (all indie, all the way). So the game will be called Ohm Chess HD and be mainly featured there.

Also check out our twitter feed for more coming up.

A bit of technical insight into the process of making it: I’ve been using the Cocos2D 2D game development library. I am currently on version 0.99-3, and this will most likely be the version that I release. I have some minor patches and features added to the library that I’ll put up on github soon, and depending on how things go with the game I might put all the sources for it up as well.

In general Cocos2D has been great for starting out on the iPad, though it doesn’t really handle orientation as well as you’d hope on that platform. Integrating with UIKit (the regular iOS widget set, buttons and so on) has been a bit of a pain as well, although that can probably be chalked up to my own inexperience with UIKit itself.