Bad Company 2 + Objective-C = BF:BC2 Stats for iPhone

May2010

The last couple months have been incredibly busy with website development, but I’ve also found a chunk of time to buckle down and create an iPhone app. The project is a companion application for Battlefield: Bad Company 2, a first-person shooter (fps) that has become one of the more popular titles in recent gaming history.

While playing the game with several friends, it became apparent that we needed a way to keep track of our stats. In particular, we wanted a way to see our progress in moving up the ranks, or to determine how much farther we had to go to achieve an award.

When I came up with the app idea, there wasn’t another iPhone/iPod project like it. However, now that I’ve spent a considerable amount of time conceptualizing and prepping (with Peter Fritz and Jeremie Clarke-Okah); coding in Objective-C; testing on various devices (thanks, Justin Tilak); and going through the tedious task of submitting the program to Apple’s AppStore, there are several similar apps available. Because it must compete with other apps for downloads, we implemented the following features that distinguish it from the rest:

1. Price: While other apps are generally $1.99 or $2.99, I’ve decided to sell the app for $0.99. After all, it was a fun project and not meant to be a primary source of income.
2. Features: I tried to bring in some novel capabilities that other apps didn’t/don’t provide. For example, I implemented a “comparison” mode where users could compare their stats to other players.
3. Layout: I’m big on visual aesthetic and I did my best to make the app look as good as possible; with big graphics, bold colours that play on the Bad Company 2 visual theme, and graphical indicators in addition to the plethora of numbers that statistics usually entail.

Essentially, we made the app that we wanted to use. Sometimes I say ‘we’ and sometimes ‘I’ because there were so many important people involved in different stages of this project. After burning the midnight oil for over forty days and nights, the result is BF:BC2 Stats.

[Click here to check out the promo website]
[Click here to check out the app in iTunes]