This was my first time making an iOS app! It was made for a competition at my university (2013 Texas Tech University Appathon). My team had 24 hours to create an app that would help with a student run event known as Humans vs. Zombies. Humans vs. Zombies is a popular game (very similar to tag) played by students all over the campus.
Zombies would chase humans, who could find shelter in designated “safe zones” or stun zombies by hitting them with a dart from a NERF gun. Once a human was tagged, they transformed into a zombie.
Our team sought out to help both sides organize their strategy. For the humans, we included a google map of the campus, and used geofencing to let the human if they were in a safe zone.
For the zombies, we added an ability for specified zombies to take on a role of leadership. Leaders would be able inform their fellow zombie allies about attacks or whatever strategic information they chose to communicate via push notifications and a “strategy feed”.
Rather than make two apps (one for humans and one for zombies), we required all users to create an account / login, which would store their human or zombie state.
We were of course pressed for time, and I was, as mentioned earlier, a complete noob in iOS development. I was however fairly familiar with HTML, CSS, and some basic Javascript. I used storyboards (and several tutorials!) to help me setup the skeleton of the app, and web views for the content.
A team member setup a back end server (Parse) for us, which included a push notification service. We created a couple of dummy users and flagged them as either zombie or human (a single bool — we weren’t that mindless).
Finally, with only about 30 minutes left and with exactly 0 hours of sleep, we were scrambling to put final touches on everything (it was like a scene from Iron Chef). Somehow it all came together and it all worked! It was one of my proudest moments, and also the moment that I decided I wanted to become an iOS developer.
What I learned:
- Introduction to iOS SDK and Xcode
- Introduction to UIWebView
- How to add and reference HTML and image assets in an iOS project
- The concept of BaaS (Parse)
- That I enjoy iOS development!
Read more about the event here.