iPhone OS 3.0

I just tested Wormies on the iPhone OS 3.0 beta 5. Everything seems to work great, both on the simulator and my iPod Touch (2nd gen, 16 GB). Kudos to the cocos2d developers who released version 0.7.3 just for OS 3.0 compatibility. Aside from this, in the last week of development I have also implemented basic predators. It's pretty sweet... random sea creatures come and try to devour your worms. Right now, you can only run away from then and hope to survive. I need to make the option to attack, using the strength attribute of each worm. I also need to add some warning that they are approaching, as it kinda happens out of the blue right now. Screenshot:

Some Changes

I implemented a few odd features this week. The radiation tool now works. While shortening each worm's lifespan, it randomly increases or decreases points in strength, speed, and charm (with a bias towards decreasing points). I also made the food tool. If worms get too hungry (currently set to half their lifetime), they'll start eating each other instead of mating. To prevent this, you need to feed them occasionally with this tool (or just kill them off quickly enough for the next generation to take over). It places a food item on the screen, which worms eventually swarm around and devour, reducing their hunger.

I also stopped an annoying bug that created zombie worms, unable to breed or be killed, just swimming around on their own out of the game's control. It seemed to be an issue with scheduling a selector call with CallFuncND before completion of a previous selector call. It would delete worms from the storage array, but the sprite would still remain in memory (and keep the random movement cycle going). Fixed it by stopping all worm actions before calling a new function (kind of an ugly fix, but it works).

Now I will be working on:

1. Adding predators which worms can attack or flee from
   
2. Improving the starting menu
   
3. Preventing the heart tool from being used with the population completely full (this can kill off all worms since breeding is stopped)
4. Making a few more sprites for various icons and interactions
5. Implement a sound system (I still need to decide on a good library for this) and come up with sound effects
6. Test the game with iPhone OS 3.0