The blog of Matthijs Hollemans, indie app maker and author of The iOS Apprentice

After a good start in January, I have to admit that not much has come of my plan to push out one new game each month. Shame on me!

February: I started work on a clone of Defender of the Crown (an Amiga classic), or at least the strategy portion of it. Alas, I got no further than the very basics:

The goal is to conquer all enemy territories by sending out your campaign army. You only have one army and you don’t know where the enemy armies are.

As far as strategy games go, this one is pretty simple. But as I’ve never made a turn-based strategy game before, starting with something simple won’t hurt. I do want to revisit this game at some point because I like the idea.

March: No work on a #1GAM game but I did give a 15-minute “blitz talk” at NSConference, which was really cool to do. The topic: why making 12 games in 12 months is a good idea.

My argument was that doing a challenge such as One Game a Month is good for learning to finish projects instead of just starting and abandoning them a week later. In addition, imposing constraints on yourself – such as an extreme time limit — help you become more creative.

If you’re into iOS development you should really buy the NSConference videos, they are great. And visit the conference next year!

April: I don’t know if this counts, but I did a remake of Juicy Breakout. This game is from a talk by Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho titled Juice It or Lose It. They show how to take a boring breakout game and make it really awesome, not by changing the gameplay but by adding tons of cascading animations and other effects.

The original game was done in Flash and their presentation isn’t really about the actual code, so I thought it would be cool to remake the game in Objective-C and Cocos2D for the iPad.

Pssst, here’s a little secret: I’m making a tutorial video out of this for RayWenderlich.com. Stay tuned for that.

Some people seem to have all the cool ideas. I’m not really one of them. Until recently, I used to find it hard to come up with ideas for apps. So I got curious: where do those people get all their product ideas from? And more important, how can I get more ideas of my own?

It might be that some of us are by nature better than others at finding new ideas. Maybe so, but I also believe that these “idea people” have trained their minds to become better at recognizing problems and possibilities.

Here’s a thing that you can do to train your own mind:

For the next 30 days, come up with at least one app idea per day.

Write your idea down in a file somewhere. It doesn’t have to be a fully fleshed out idea, one sentence is enough: “An app that finds recipes based on what food you have sitting in your fridge.” That’s all you need.

It also doesn’t have to be a good idea, or an original one, or even something that is actually possible — it just has to be something that you came up with.

More than one idea per day is fine too. In fact, once you get started with this exercise you will find that ideas start to pop up everywhere.

Don’t get disheartened if the ideas for the first ten or so days are pretty bad or if it turns out that they have already been done before. If you keep at it, you might surprise yourself with how many good ideas you will have in addition to the bad ones.

The point here isn’t really to have only great ideas, but to generate ideas in the first place.

I did this exercise in September last year and of the 100 or so ideas that I wrote down over the course of the month, about 20 were actually pretty decent, and two or three were really good ones. I wouldn’t have discovered the good ones without going through the bad ones first!

There are many small annoyances in our lives that we are unaware of and have learned to accept or ignore or work around. We no longer question these issues; they have become blind spots. But when your mind starts actively looking for things that can be improved, you’re slowly becoming aware of these annoyances again. They are excellent candidates for app ideas (or other inventions).

For example, I often view recipes from American or British websites on my iPad while cooking. The problem is that they have measurements in cups, ounces, lbs, Fahrenheit and other silly units. I’d love to have an app that scans the web page with the recipe and converts all the amounts to the metric system, so I don’t have to do each calculation by hand.

How often do you think, “I wish I had an app for that?” If you are an idea person you probably think this all the time.  The point of this exercise is to get yourself thinking like this too.

Give it a shot. It doesn’t have to take more than five or ten minutes a day, and you’ll never be without app ideas again.

Photo Credit: Diego Dalmaso

If you still haven’t caught up with all the new APIs in iOS 5 and iOS 6 — which wouldn’t surprise me as these releases added a ton of new stuff — then do yourself a favor and get the books iOS 5 by Tutorials and iOS 6 by Tutorials.

Of course, I’m biased because I co-wrote these books, but if you enjoy reading the tutorials from www.RayWenderlich.com, then you’ll enjoy these books too. It’s the first place I go to when I want to learn a new API.

Both are now available as printed books and they are huge, two volumes each:

If you already bought the PDF version, then you get a discount on the printed books. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me (log in to the private forums for the instructions).

This is a good opportunity to get up-to-date on the latest and greatest that the iOS SDK has to offer — at least until iOS 7.

Grab your copy at the raywenderlich.com online store

About a week ago I signed up for One Game a Month, a challenge to make twelve games in 2013, roughly one per month. I already planned to release five new iPhone and iPad games on App Store in the first half of this year, so adding another seven isn’t such a big deal.

This is a screenshot of the game I made for January, Galaxy Apocalypse:

It’s a pretty simple game where you have to swipe planets into portals of the matching color before those portals run out of power and the whole galaxy explodes. You don’t want that to happen on your watch…

The game took five days to make from scratch to finish. If I had more time I would polish it more and put it on the App Store. In its current shape it’s not a bad game but still a bit below the level of what I think is good enough for the App Store, so I will clean up the source code (it’s quite messy right now) and put it on Github as a programming example.

Update: Here’s the code, github.com/hollance/GalaxyApocalypse

Here is a video of the game in action:

I have to say I like these sorts of challenges. I’ve done similar challenges in the past, such as composing at least one piece of piano music or coming up with at least one app idea each day for 30 days in a row. It’s a lot of work but it also pushes your creativity to higher levels.

When you limit yourself to making a game in a very short time, then by necessity you have to limit the scope of the game. Such constraints can be quite inspirational. How small can you make a game that is still interesting?

One of my most successful games, Ultimate Countdown (now removed from the App Store but coming back later this year in an all-new version), was done in a single weekend as a similar kind of challenge. It ended up being downloaded over 250,000 times, which I found quite impressive back in 2008, even for a free game.

So if you’re into game development — or if making games is something you’ve always dreamed of — then head on over to www.onegameamonth.com and sign up! Make games, not excuses.

Good news! iOS 6.0 was just released and that means I and my co-authors can finally make our latest ebook, iOS 6 by Tutorials, available!

If you want to take advantage of all the new features from iOS 6, such as Auto Layout, Pass Book, UICollectionView, the new Social Framework, and much more… then this is the book for you.

In fact, there is so much to tell that the book ended up being over 1500 pages! That should keep you busy until iOS 7 comes out.

You can get iOS 6 by Tutorials exclusively from RayWenderlich.com.

And there is no better time than now, because we’re running a launch special that gets you a nice discount, especially if you buy it in combination with our previous iOS 5 by Tutorials ebook.

As part of the launch celebration we’re currently giving away a lot of free stuff in the “iOS 6 Feast” at raywenderlich.com, so head on over and see if you can score some!

P.S. I also updated my iOS Apprentice series for Xcode 4.5 and iOS 6. It doesn’t really go into depth on all the new features of iOS 6 — that’s what iOS 6 by Tutorials is for — but it does give you instructions for working with the latest versions of Xcode, so it’s totally up-to-date again.

If you’ve already purchased The iOS Apprentice (thanks!) then you can find the latest downloads in the forums.

Have fun playing with iOS 6! I know that we did when we were writing this book.