Andrew Friedland

Broadside was created as a summer project to learn the iPhone SDK by one of my friends and me. In Broadside, two capital ships are alligned next to each other. Each ship has four turret mounts, and any of six turret types can be placed on each mount. Every offensive turret can be countered by one of the defensive turrets, forcing players to rapidly respond to their opponents offensive and defensive moves.

Overall the game seems to have worked out fairly well. There are still a few small things left to hammer out before it is ready to be posted in the iPhone app store, but for the most part the game is up and running.

One thing the game is missing is a multiplayer option. About three quarters of the way through development, we realized that while the AI may work well, it will never be as good as having a human opponent. By that point, however, integrating the iPhone GameKit to allow for a multiplayer option would have taken more work than we had time for.

One of the most difficult aspects of this project was balancing. We have 6 turrets in the game, and each game generally lasts less than 1 minute. However, knowing which values to tweak, even when something seems overpowered, is difficult, as changing the strength any one turret changes the balance of all of the turrets.

Objective C

Source code is available upon request

Andrew Friedland