As for the whimsical audio in-game, Pro Tools® was used along with audio processing plugins. The team also wrote custom tools to process the assets and data.
Hardware wise the team used Lenovo ThinkPads and Mac Book Pros along with whopping 30” monitors. Sweet! In addition Lumpy apparently stated that we’re not to forget the iPhones and iPod touches used for testing.
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In conjunction with Xcode, 2n created their custom engine entitled Eos. Eos is essentially a multi-platform engine that encapsulates all of the common components you would find associated with most platforms. Apparently the engine can handle a variety of tasks including launching to the exit of an application, file handling, resource management, input resource, audio, and graphics. Phew, that’s quite a bit, but it doesn’t end there.
The audio engine supports either OpenAL (used for the PC, Mac, and iPhone) and AudioQueues (used for Mac and iPhone). The current version of QuitIt used AudioQueues.
Although it’s apparent that the renderer is indeed a 2D renderer Ben has stated that it includes hooks to support 3D, which the team plans to implement sometime in the near future.
“QuitIt! uses the Eos renderer to interface with the platform’s graphics API. Right now, the renderer uses either OpenGL or OpenGL ES depending on the platform.
Even though all our tools have been ported to the Mac, our primary development is done on the PC. We first built everything on the PC, then ported it to the Mac, and then finally ported it to the iPhone. We only compile for the iPhone when we want to deploy builds or if we run into a bug that is really iPhone dependent.”
iDevice limited memory rears it ugly head
Stated before in past articles, one thing is for sure, working on the iPhone platform can be a major headache to many devs wishing to squeeze the most out of its limitations in respects to memory, and this isn’t an iPhone dependant issue, all home based consoles constantly experience the same hurdles time and time again, going forward it would be great to alleviate these issues, but I find it to be unlikely as budgets and user demands continue to grow. The delicate balancing act that will forever persist between code and art will likely always to be evident, push either too far onto the opposing side usually presents challenges on all fronts.
In the early days of development, art production proved to be a challenge for the team, since Eos tools were constantly being amended, management of the large amount of assets in-game presented problems within the development timeline.
“Probably the biggest technical hurdle was managing the in-game memory and controlling the overall bundle size. The game is actually quite large. A lot of time was spent planning and managing the assets so they would have the smallest memory footprint necessary and could be loaded in dynamically. For example, Pokers have a graphic set, an audio sound effect, and data that define how the payouts behave. When you change the Poker, these things must be swapped. Gifts and even rooms also swap in replacement assets when necessary. Our menus however, are not dynamically swapped.”
“We wanted to build an app that stood out so we chose to use the highest resolution assets whenever possible. We did a lot of experimentation and took a lot of time reducing asset size as much as possible without compromising fidelity. For example, even though our engine supports PVRTC textures, we only used them maybe once or twice because it creates too many noticeable artifacts for the art style of our game. The game actually uses quite a bit of 32-bit graphics in the form of either true color or palletized 32-bit images. The last week of production was spent constantly whittling down that size. Even though the app’s iTunes download size is 5.4MB, the size of the bundlewe submitted to Apple before zipping was a little less than 24MB. Mmmm … the power of compression. Around 2 weeks before submission, the game was 60MB+.”
Lights, Camera, Action!
Probably one of the most engaging aspects of QuitIt other than poking Lumpy are the SFX and music, I often found myself chuckling at the throw back game show theme music, the oohs and ahhs of the audience to Lumpy’s sometimes excited and bewildered noises. As an experiment I tried playing the game with the sound off to see if I gain the same experience, and as expected I quickly turned the volume up again.
2n went with custom SFX after trying a majority of off the shelf sound libraries that didn’t quite fit the bill with what the team envisioned. Andrew the team’s audio engineer took the reigns and created many samples of which where then blended to give each poker, gift and holiday its own unique style and personality of sorts.
Although Lumpy currently only speaks a couple words of English, his varied sounds of displeasure and laughter from the unique voice-over talent, gives him a great personality that can only get better with time.
“For the VO, we actually hired a voice actor. The selection process for finding Lumpy’s “voice” was fun. After maybe going through a dozen audition recordings, we had our “Eureka!” moment when we heard the audition of the actor who became Lumpy. We’re really happy about how that turned out.“
Music production for 2n was an additional challenge they weren’t expecting, they expressed the difficulty of providing an authentic 70′s game show vibe in the likes of the aforementioned game shows such as The Newlywed Game and The Dating Game.
“I think there’s a certain charm in the music of the time that’s been lost in contemporary TV shows. Chuck Barris, who was the composer of the themes for both the Dating Game and Newlywed Game and the producer of the shows, was a genius.”
If it weren’t for the well timed animations, Lumpy would have lost a lot of appeal. The current set of animations really do allow the end user to be engaged with curiosity of seeing what Lumpy will do next. They’re currently only 55 animations in his current animation set, and although he responds adequately to various degrees of pokes, I would however love to see more fluidity in the animations, as they are jumps in-between transitions and movements – however this can all be easily rectified with the scalability of the Eos engine by simply adding additional frames of animation in-between poses once created.
“We have lots more planned for future versions of QuitIt! Our animation system is really flexible, so adding animations for Lumpy is really just a matter of getting more of them built. The only limit we would face is the available amount of memory in the system. Right now, the Lumpster is probably about 5MB worth of texture and animation data. The majority of that is stored as 32-bit color textures.”
QuitIts’ architecture is fashioned from the ground to be modular, this allows the developers to simply “Plug n’ play” assets such as pokers, gifts, SFX to future episodes and even mini-games with minimal effort.
“We made a conscious choice to take the longer path by building a system that was more robust and scalable. With QuitIt!, we wanted to build a brand that felt like it was built with quality and care. Our goal is to provide longer term satisfaction for our users.“
Tito A. Belgrave is currently employed as a Character Artist at Ubisoft Toronto. He's also an avid freelance game journalist. 
Well i do agree that is a new idea and all but i cant help but feel bad for the guy lumpy i mean look at him doesn’t make you feel a bit sad he getting punk by you LOL
Worry not! Lumpy’s a professional actor. So teasing him is just fine. The current update we are working on will have some good things start to happen him … you will be able to make him a bit happy.
And the happiness meter mentioned in the article should come to life in the 3rd episode.