Well, that was a bit disappointing.

I attended an iPhone Developer’s Meetup group earlier this night (well, it’s 3:10 in the morning now, so maybe I should say “last night”) with two of my former coworkers. We had been talking about starting a small game, just for the fun of it really, for the iPhone. Never mind that none of us currently own an iPhone or iTouch (doesn’t that sound like cause for a harassment suit?), but the artist of the group mentioned that he would be looking at getting one soon.

The meeting was of no help for me or Mo, not surprisingly, as it dealt with the coding side of things, of which neither of us have no training in; instead, we took the time to doodle and sketch. Our programmer, however, also didn;t really get much from it, because despite him not knowing the codebase, he was not only able to follow the discussion, but even correct the speaker on a few points because, as he later said, “the topic was really pretty basic stuff.”

Afterward, we had a nice brainstorming session in the highly-overpriced atmosphere of Starbucks, and came up with an intriguing idea.

The bad news is that a few hours later, we got an e-mail from the programmer saying that he was going to have to back out. The problem is that while he could pick up the code, it would be the 4th code set that he would be juggling at the time, and since he programs on a PC, he wasn’t keen on installed Mac OS just for iPhone development.

So, the options now are:

1) Change the platform from iPhone to Flash. I have no issue with this, but since the artist was the one who started this whole thing in the first place, I would want him to make the call.
2) Continue the search for a iPhone programmer who would be willing to, basically, work for free. Which is not that difficult, but I suspect that finding programmers in this sense is just like finding roomies through Craigslist — it’s a total crapshoot.

Either way, the programmer and I were already talking about collaborating on another project, and since I’m not employed at the moment, it’s easy for me to load up on projects. The sad thing is that I was actually getting interested in the game idea, and while the artist and I can carry it forward, it would be sad to do so without the programmer.

I think I’ll ping the artist tomorrow and let him know that regardless, I’ll spec out the game idea, and we can make a decision in terms of staying with the iPhone platform or moving to Flash.

Regardless, it’s something of a bummer.