The Career Gamer » iPod Touch

The making of Wispin : The joys of At-home game development

lildragon — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 14:00:14 +0000

Developer Grumpyface Studios – the studio behind the colorful and charming iPhone title Wispin has posted Part:1 of their post-mortem.
In addition, at a cost cheaper than your average Starbucks latte, you’ll be helping indie game development all the while boosting your karma meter . Enjoy! [Read more]

Related Links:
iTunes Link [1.99]
Grumpyface Studios

Ravensword: Tech Review

lildragon — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:00:51 +0000

One of my most memorable moments in an open world RPG setting came to me when I first laid hands on Gothic for the PC, the title was not only eloquently presented and crafted for its time, it had a great hook; the world around your character was alive. It was one of the few titles I’ve touched that kept me playing late into the night until the yellow/orange tinge of the morning sun began to fill my room. Heck I loved the game so much so I conducted an interview with the developers in 2001 and again in 2002 for Gothic 2. So imagine my excitement when I learnt of a title inspired by Gothic and Oblivion was about to make its way to a portable platform in the fall of 2009. I was giddy with excitement and immediately expressed my interest in the title Ravensword for the iphone.
I caught up with Josh and Russ on how they approached the monumental task of bringing a large scale title such as an open world RPG to a portable platform.

Putting a world in the palm of your hand

Upon booting up Ravensword, first, you will be impressed with the incredible attention to detail followed by the immediate urge to explore what appears to be a vast world that lays before you, wrought with adventures to be had– and on both counts, you would be right. It’s hard to comprehend that a team consisting primarily of two individuals over the course of seven working months, could tie together all the assets and code needed for use in the title.

“We didn’t really start out planning something huge, but as we built it, some things just obviously needed to be added. Eventually we got to the point where we felt we had something worth buying, and released it.”

With the shear scope of the project one would expect that not everything would pan out as planned. When taking on a project of this magnitude which is mainly targeted to an audience very familiar with the genre, you will evidently hit the mark on some areas and regretfully miss on others, which is not all to surprising given the scope and timeframe. And though given that some important factors of game play and content are noticeably absent, they didn’t in anyway make it a game breaker.

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Stemming from game play I found the controls responsive and somewhat intuitive, the reason I say somewhat stems back from my harping on the touch screen controls issues that arises on the iPhone/Touch platforms. Aside from that I was curious as to how the final design decision behind the controls came to be, Russ simply stated;

We gave the game to some people to play, and they all suggested the control scheme we ended up with. I was pretty resistant to changing it that late in development, but had to give in.

One of the implementations I was keen on learning more about, was the design decision behind incorporating a “jump” button as opposed to say a block/dodge button leaving jumping/climbing as a context driven event.

I don’t like the game taking over your character for you, and I don’t like the feeling of having your character glued to the ground. We were considering blocking for the first release, but time did not allow for it.

Although I agree with him that sometimes this can be correct, I would have to respectfully disagree here, I would even argue that the opposite is true. For example take the 2009 hit title Demon’s souls, a game which is somewhat rooted in reality, where you have the protagonist “glued” to the ground, but has been given the ability to roll/evade in combat and by pushing against an appropriate object would initiate a “climb over” event. Now given that this game was geared towards the “hardcore” audience you would think it would cause a stir that you can’t freely jump, but what’s interesting to my knowledge it never came up or was raised as an issue, so it’s quite apparent different design philosophies exist here. In all honesty I’ve never found a reason to jump unless of course it’s to higher levels which are rare occasions unless platforming is a major feature within your game. Jumping in combat makes the entire process implausible due to the fact that it’s not exactly practical. So what I’m trying to express here is given the small real estate of the platform, utilizing more usable behaviours could heighten the game experience that much more.

Peeling back the layers of armor

As an adventure/Action RPG, focusing on common lores, magic and exploration, I wanted to believe that armaments such as shields, boots and the like with unique statistics would be on the forefront, unfortunately such wasn’t the case in Ravensword’s current release. When asked whether they were initial difficulties incorporating these features, Russ assured me that this wasn’t entirely the case.

Not really. There were just so many other things to work on that we didn’t spend time to flesh all of that out as much as people apparently would have liked. We’ll be extending that stuff a lot on the next release, though.

For stat mongers who relish the idea of viewing detailed statistics on weapons and armor would be a tad underwhelmed. Unfortunately a large part of my adventure was brought slowly to a crawl because of this omission; this is one of those cases where you can see ideas flowing but were cut short due to circumstances. Now if they were only one weapon and armor available as a gamer I would’ve accepted this and not strive for a goal that gives no real sense of accomplishment. Mind you, I did feel good about finally claiming the top sword and armor within the game, but it didn’t feel like the triumph I was hoping for.

Character wise, stats are automatically scaled based on your level advancement which isn’t a bad decision, but when they really don’t add to the game it’s a bit odd, one stat in particular I had trouble understanding was the large disparity between endurance and the other stats such as strength. On my completion of the game, my end stats where; Strength – 15, Endurance 553, Dexterity 72 and Luck 58. So naturally I inquired, Russ’s reasoning behind this is;

Endurance, as we’ve defined it, is a bucket to hold your health points. All the stats started out in roughly the same range, and endurance grew during the process of difficulty tuning. I kind of like having a big number for it to, as it gives you a feeling of invincibility when you are at higher levels.

Invincibility is great, but intertwined within normal gameplay made the title significantly unbalanced for me.

One of the more intriguing aspects of the game came from the dialogue trees which were represented well, and with a solid base laid in front of them the team does have future plans to make them even more robust;

The dialog scripts are state machines that interact with each other and the mission system. I considered implementing an abstraction layer so they could be made without changing code, but found that approach to be pretty limiting without a lot of work. That’s something up for consideration in our next release, as we will be doing more branching in the story, and that will have to be reflected in the conversations.

Running on pure horsepower

One of the amazing things you would find once playing Ravensword is the strength in its graphically fidelity and the teams ability to handle the iPhone/Touch 1G-3G processors and ram limitations with the greatest of respect. Playing on my 1G iPod Touch, I found that the performance was remarkable and when asked about some of the techniques used to optimize performance and load times while retaining such graphical fidelity, Josh said;

Russ really handled it with culling techniques, and reducing numbers of verts in ways that I don’t quite understand. He’s really a genius on that end.

Software wise the team used Unity iPhone, along with industry standards 3ds Max and Photoshop, and they all ran on “crappy” laptops according to Josh .

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Technically speaking the hero character has roughly 12 animations throughout, with each NPC occupying 1 animation, but according to the team this will be changing with subsequent releases as they plan to re-work the entire animation system giving them the scalability to add more behaviours to various characters.

Poly count wise, each character ranged from 300 to 1000 polygons with each environment ranging between a respectful 7k to 10k. And depending on the object their textures never extend beyond 512x 512.
According to Josh, overcoming technical hurdles wasn’t the real issue, the issue stemmed from the first paragraph, figuring out just how to make a massive seemingly open world appear to be just that. To offset this issue, the team chose to break the game world down into zones, essentially making the task manageable.

Between Josh and Russ, their duties were split evenly amongst them with the help of contracted freelancers.

Russ was in charge of all Programming aspects, writing the story (some refinement from my part) and I did the graphics in the game, level design, models, and textures. I hired out some freelancers for most of the animation and characters – which would end up getting refined by me in the end and brought into the engine.

Sound wise, I was truly impressed with the soothing melodies and ambience throughout the game, and although some of the sound f/x such as the sword “hit” could use a bit more work, everything worked well together. The team did well with what they had available, since everything comes at a cost when developing on a tight budget you do have to make the most with what you have, and in this case it was purchasing stock music from Sound Rangers and similar websites. Some Sound f/x were even recorded by Josh and Russ themselves.

Quest complete

So now that Ravensword’s release was greeted with wide acclaim, the team has taken an extremely valuable lesson away from it all;

It’s best to listen to your customers. That’s what it all comes down to. What they want in the game – the main points they have to say – will truly make a better game.

I would like to give a big thanks to Josh, Russ and Chillingo for participating in this tech review. There’s an incredible amount of potential with Ravensword, that I’m anxious to see realized.

A word from the devs

We’re currently working on the Ravensword 2 now; there will be a lot to look forward to in the sequel. The size of the world will be doubled, and you will have plenty of options as regard to character choice. There will be new weapons, enemies, better AI – just about everything will be improved. We are crafting the story now – and it takes place in a unique local – should be a nice break from the old version.

Ravensword Game Summary
Developed by: HumanPowered Games / Cresent Moon Games
Published by: Chillingo
Platforms: iPhone and iPod touch
Development time: 7 months
Number of Developers: 2 in-house
Interesting unknown fact: Josh’s wife did the sounds for the Goblin. To this day she still growls at him.
Purchase price: $4.99
Purchase link: Ravensword – itunes
Official website: Ravensword

QuitIt already!: QuitIt Tech Review

lildragon — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:11:58 +0000

Ok between you and I, we both know that you’ve indulged in a guilty pleasure in some form or another, I mean we “are” human after all no? Whether it be treating yourself to the last half of that double chocolate fudge encrusted triple layer cake at the back of fridge knowing you’re on a diet or playing the latest video game when you know full well you should be working, we can all safely say, yes I’m guilty as charged.

So what’s all of this have to do with 2n Productions latest game QuitIt? Imagine if you will if someone told you that the object of the game QuitIt was to poke and tease a character name Lumpy (figuratively and relatively speaking) until the poor bugger coughed up mounds of cash were you can then use to further purchase other ways to continue your amusement and not have any repercussions, chances are you might take the opportunity. After playing QuitIt for an hour or so, I got in touch with Benjamin Lee and the team at 2n Productions to find out where and how this idea came about, and what exactly makes it tick.

Is QuitIt really that alien of an idea?

Many good ideas come from the least expected places, if it’s not a napkin doodle in a restaurant, it’s something a family member or friend could say in passing. And it’s usually those ideas that are the root of something special. After purchasing QuitIt on an impulse buy, I wanted to see where this particular idea would go.

QuitIt! Is a virtual game show set in roughly the same era you would find shows such as The Newlywed game, The Dating Game or possibly even Press your luck (Whammy). You take up the role as an active participant in the audience of the QuitIt game show, you are tasked to “interact” with Lumpy by poking him repeatedly to win cold hard cash. It’s not as bad as it sounds though, Lumpy’s agent got him the gig and Lumpy apparently enjoys his method acting role immensely.

“We were working on another project that was a bit challenging. Our art director, Christopher, drew a blobby Jabba the Hutt looking guy on the white board and said something like “I feel like him.” I think I went up the board and pretended to poke it with a dry erase marker. We were probably frustrated and tired … we started to laugh hysterically over it. We went back and forth riffing on the idea about how funny it would be if nothing good ever happened to the guy. From there, we came up with several fun concepts. At that particular moment, it was just a whimsical idea. A few days later, someone’s daughter came in and commented how much she liked the picture and started drawing him everywhere. We just looked at each other and said “That’s what we’re gonna build next!”

Taking a simple idea further

Even after initial excitement of a new project surfaces it can usually take sometime to get the ball rolling on implementation. The initial idea of QuitIt came around late summer of 08′, but the actual start of planning and pre-production didn’t begin until fall of the same year.

“During our early conceptualization phase of QuitIt! we also started building our multi-platform game engine. We spent October and November of 2008 working on our engine and doing a lot of conceptual work. In early December I built the first prototype for QuitIt! Our initial plans were for a 3D Lumpy that was pretty expressive. But at a point Christopher thought the game would have a lot more charm if he was 2D.”

And I couldn’t agree more – the whimsical nature of the music and SFX associate perfectly with the 2D rendered character. I often find it jarring when something that would work perfectly in 2D gets retrofitted with 3D simply because the technology is readily available. Sometimes less really is more.

“The first prototype was to test whether or not we could build Lumpy as a 2D character. During that time, Lumpy was green and shaped differently. We were a bit surprised that he was actually quite fun looking as a 2D character, especially since he was built using very few frames of animation.”

During the month of December the team took the prototype and settled on the version of Lumpy as you see him today. In the couple of months following, the team allocated a period of time to build the appropriate tool chain which would run alongside their custom engine. The full production swing didn’t actually begin until March of 09′ giving it a full production time of roughly nine months.

Finding Lumpy’s sweet spot

As they should be, I found that the controls in QuitIt are relatively simple, the beauty of the design and the fact that the target platform is an iDevice made perfect sense. Again less is definitely more in an application such as this, it was also a pleasure that 2n forego the implementation of accelerometer based controls just for the sake of the tools being available to them.

“We play tested a lot of iPhone apps. We found that using the accelerometer for directional control often felt clumsy and frustrating. We also noticed that touch gestures, although very intuitive, suffered from the problem of occluding areas of the screen when touching. That is, you couldn’t see stuff on screen because your finger(s) covered it up!”

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“We wanted the poker to feel light and springy to move, but also to have a feel that its movement would be naturally dampened if you let go of it.”

The satisfaction is the ability to feel like you’re actually poking Lumpy, and 2n pulled this off to great effect. Not only are they many points of interests on Lumpy, you really got the sense of teasing him with the poker as he watches your movements ever so carefully before your strike. 2n did a great job on giving the end player a real sense of participation, I honestly played straight for 1/2 hr just to see Lumpy’s different reactions to what’s happening on screen.

“Touching or poking Lumpy also seemed like the natural choice. We toyed around with the idea that flicking the poker would be more satisfying. But we decided in the end that you could still see enough of Lumpy’s animation as well as touching him helped to reinforce that you are indeed “poking” him.”

Keeping Lumpy in shape

This may come as a bit of a surprise to many of you, but the artwork in QuitIt was built using a combination of Autodesk® Maya® (yes a 3D application) , the Adobe suite of tools consisting of Flash, Illustrator and Photoshop, and finally tied together with Equilibrium® DeBabelizer® . Programming was done using MS Dev Studio 2005, Xcode, and the always reliable text editor.

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I Dig it.. no seriously I do: I Dig It Tech Review

lildragon — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:00:41 +0000

One of the greatest adaptations of the iPhone/iTouch platforms is the fact that it’s a vast playing field for developers to romp and explore to their heart’s content. Some developers decide to try their hand at an untouched genre, others recreate classics that for many whom have been gaming since the dawn of Commodore, Atari and Coleco Vision platforms (now that’s a warm fuzzy feeling) can relate to and really appreciate how far gaming has come.

One such developer is InMotion Software. The enthusiastic Brian Howard (Founder and Programmer) gave me the opportunity to discuss how their new release I Dig It came to be I Dig It follows a classic genre popularized by the 1982 retro-classic Dig Dug, and more recently Motherload. Let’s take a look at why I Dig It had me mesmerized for hours on end.

On the surface

I Dig It main campaign revolves around a character introduced as Farmer Lewis; he has basically dug himself into a hole ‘ financially and literally. With that he had a brilliant idea, converting an old bulldozer into a high tech digging machine, all in an effort to dig underground to collect items ranging from junk to the rarest of gems in order to raise money to save the farm; you can instantly begin to see the charm in the title.

From the initial “wouldn’t it be cool if’” napkin discussions at a restaurant with fellow co-workers, I Dig It went from concept to completion with a development period of seven weeks.

The scope of the game not only focused on digging, but micro management of resources such as fuel, temperature and hull protection from the harsh element that is earth, but now I think of it, water/rain would make an interesting obstacle in game play but I digress.

Gaining control of a digger

Operating a digger requires refined controls that can accomplish the job in an enjoyable and timely manner, InMotion Software thought ahead to give us full control over the digger’s movement. Utilizing a single on-screen analog stick and alternatively touch-screen controls, the latter being the least used as I found the virtual analog stick handled tasks surprisingly well. Although I mentioned in a recent article, that I felt it will be a long time coming until iPhone implemented controls replaces the tactile feel of raised buttons, I was pleasantly surprised at the responsiveness of I Dig It’s implementation.

I Dig It’s control stick was born out of the need for a good analog control stick on the iPhone. We had briefly toyed with the more popular D-pad control but found that it didn’t provide the desired level of control for the digger. So we spent some time looking at what was out there already and found that nobody (that I knew of) had really done a decent job at emulating an analog control stick. None of them had that realistic look and feel, so we took a pass at it and we are pretty happy with the results. “

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After playing for roughly 4 hours, I was quite happy the controls worked as well as they did, since one of the best features of the game is exploration, and after free-falling to the depths of the level, you will need very agile controls to get you back to the surface before you fuel tank runs dry.

Keeping up with tech

Farmer Lewis wasn’t the only one sporting high-tech gear; the team at InMotion had everything they needed to get the job done. Art Director Bradley W. Lewis outfitted himself with 3ds Max and Adobe Photoshop to accomplish his pixel and polygon pushing tasks. Xcode was used alongside a set of shiny new Unibody 13′ Macbooks and one PC to run the aforementioned 3ds Max.

More impressive was the Emblazed engine ‘ a custom 2D engine created by the team which dramatically improves programmer productivity with texture management, common rendering related tasks, and game physics by tightly integrating with the open source Chipmunk physics engine. Developers should take note in knowing that the Emblazed engine is currently being prepared for release as a third party middleware engine to those who require its functionality.

Gaining familiarity with the platform, there weren’t many hurdles InMotion came across that couldn’t be resolved, hence the impressive seven week development period.

Really the technical hurdles were pretty small, especially compared to our last title “Dungeon Defense”. By the time we started work on “I Dig It” we were actually getting pretty comfortable with the platform so there weren’t any real surprises. With that said, the trickiest part to get right was the tunneling system. What we came up with was an ingenious way of making it look great while making it really simple to implement. There were a few technologies we started playing with but they weren’t ready for prime-time, but they’ll make it into our next title… “

Being a 2D game, polycounts aren’t much of an issue, and even though the digger was created as a high poly model in 3ds Max, the resulting in-game polycounts were very modest, usually well under 100 polys in a typical scene.
Texture wise the digger used a 256×256 texture sheet and it’s rendered at a reduced size on screen, which kept the memory footprint light and quite manageable.

Although small, one of the coolest additions was the subtle particle effects, it added life to the little digger and give it character which really connected me subconsciously to game ‘ one of the most important traits for any object on screen.

In I Dig It, the particle effects are subtle, from the small exhaust puffs at idle, to the dust clouds rising from the diggers treads, to the smoke from the thruster flame. These all combine to give the digger some character and really bring him to life. Our particle effect system in I Dig It is actually very basic; the real magic is in the artwork itself. “

It takes more than one to operate a digger

Like most developers I’ve interviewed, many of them are a team of up to five talented individuals that have a common goal in mind ‘ namely to create a fun, memorable title in the shortest amount of time possible. InMotion Software is no different, I Dig It’s team consisted of three people working fulltime ‘ Bradley W. Lewis (Art) and programmers Jeremy Howa (lead) and Brian Howard. They also enlisted design support from Chris “Cookie” Graham and Jeff “Jello” Robinson’ don’t ask.

Coming away from it all, the biggest lesson learnt was in relation to teamwork. Knowing where everyone fits in the team and their executions of their specific roles, made the entire process go much smoother.

As usual with most small scale dev teams, operating budgets are kept to a minimum while the fun level bar continues to rise and rise, in my books this is a trade off that I, and I’m sure most of you are more than happy to welcome. Priced at a modest $0.99 (as of writing), you can’t really go wrong with picking up the title, heck I guarantee you spend more than that on coffee a day. So when I asked Brian how he felt about developing for the iPhone market, he had this to say;

Why did we pick the iPhone platform? Because the mortgage industry sucks right now! In all seriousness it’s really the only platform where a couple of guys can come together and build something in such a short amount of time with only a modest investment. The App Store isn’t without its challenges (like how to stand out among 50,000 apps), and we’ve had our fair share of approval and submission frustrations, but all in all it’s been a pretty good platform. “

No argument here, I can honestly say I’ve spent greater amount of time playing titles $2.99 and under on my iTouch device than on my PS3 PSN titles, and at a fraction of the price I’ve even had lots more fun doing so.

Exploring new depths

I Dig It is definitely a title that I would love to see more improvements added ‘ such things as more obstacles, possibly even more of a story would all be things that are welcomed. As a testament to any well designed game, always leave them wanting more. And although there’s no specific plans to expand on the title, Brian Howard reassures that the possibility is always there;

I can honestly say that there wasn’t much we had to cut. We had a few ideas for expanding the digger’s world that didn’t make it in the initial release, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of an expansion update at some point. There are no specific plans for expansions to the game right now (other than bug fixes and minor improvements), but as I alluded to I wouldn’t rule out the possibility.

Rest assured there will be another update incoming, as of writing the next update to I Dig It has been sent off for approval by Apple, and it’s touting more game content with lots of improvements. And according to Brian, the submission process isn’t the real culprit here, it’s the wait.

Thanks to Brian Howard and his team at InMotion Software for taking some time out in order to conduct this tech interview. Best of luck in the future and here’s looking forward to many more hours gaming.

I Dig It Game Summary:
Developed by: InMotion Software
Published by: InMotion Software
Platforms: iPhone and iPod touch
Development time: 7 weeks
Number of Developers: 3 in-house
Purchase price: $1.99
Purchase link: I Dig It- itunes
Official websites: InMotion Software

Hunt or be hunted: iDracula Tech review

lildragon — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:15:33 +0000

When you’re not busy slashing or gunning your way through hordes of Zombies, the next best thing would be to include an even wider variety of mythical beasts in the likes of werewolves, witches and the nocturnal creme de la cr me of baddies- Vampires or better put Dracula himself.

Continuing my tech review converage of intense but satisfying iphone/iPod touch games, I turned my focus to Moregames Entertainment on just how they’ve assembled iDracula, currently as of writing the reigning king of paid apps on the Appstore.

Why re-invent the wheel? Keep it simple

Finding adequate resources for a development team of any size can often be a momenumental task, even more-so in small teams of five and under, re-inventing the wheel in terms of base assets, frameworks e.t.c, can be time-consuming at best and can really hurt your chances of releasing a title in a timely manner or even at all. However the latter wasn’t the case for the team at MoreGames Entertainment. Working fast with no holidays and with 12-14 hr workdays, they’ve managed to use their resources adequately to release iDracula within a two month time span.

The idea behind iDracula was to release a functional and fun experience in a fast timely manner at a very reasonable pricepoint. With this thought process in mind programmer Pavel Kupriyanov utilized an existing framework built around a previously released title Orions: Legend of Wizards. By using this as a jump off point Pavel leveraged on the solved issues of the past and in his words, Apple’s alien Xcode tools as well.

“We spend 2 weeks to make a working prototype, and about 3 weeks more to add features and polish. About a week of which was optimizing graphics to reduce memory footprint. We’ve also been working on update since the release, so it would be a little over 2 months in total.”

When starting out, the aforementioned should always be at the forefront in the minds of ‘bedroom coders’, using existing tools isn’t wrong by any means, in fact on the contrary it’s very smart.

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One of the reasons why iDracula becomes extremely engaging is the use of the controls. Simply put, they couldn’t be any simplier in design, which allows casual and core gamers alike to easily pick up the game and begin playing. Essentially the game simulates on screen touch controls that with your left thumb you can move the character around with a virtual ‘thumb stick’ whereas with your right thumb you control the aim and shooting of the hero’s gun; Pavel was even thoughtful enough to include an option to switch placement of the aforementioned touch controls for our lefty friends out there. It works great as is, but the only caveat I came across with said controls (which is the case with most iPhone games that play in this manner) is with the limited real estate on screen, I found that my left thumb was a little to large and got in the way when the hero was on the lower area of the screen, but alternatively switching to my index finger fixed that problem.

“I had this idea in my mind from the very start. I didn’t even consider other options, I had a clear vision this would work best. Andrey had an idea of adding accelerometer control, but once I implemented my “wheels”; it wasn’t needed anymore, because the scheme worked like a charm.”

The controls held up especially well when the enemies grew in numbers and began to swarm the hero character. However having said that, I feel it will be a long time coming until iPhone implemented controls replaces the tactile feel of raised buttons.

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Taking on Dracula with more that a wooden stake

Not utilizing any particular engine, Pavel built from the foundation of an earlier ‘Crashlanding’ example. He began once he got a handle on the architecture of Xcode, and additionally leveraging on ported code from pre-existing Windows Mobile projects. From there artist Andrey Kovalchuk took the reigns and used 3dsMax for character creation and animation, and Photoshop 7 for textures and additional onscreen elements- why not the latest Photoshop you ask? Apparently Photoshop 7 was the most stable interation for Andrey.

Hardware wise the team used a bottom of the line macbook, a Wacom Intuos A4, and an Intel Core’2 Quad Q9400 2660MHz with of course an iPhone for debugging and playtesting.

Technically sound?

With most iPhone developers, eventually they will run into some roadblocks if their aspirations are a little too ambitious. And with everything we do as developers whether it be for home consoles or portable gaming devices, memory allocations will always haunt us, especially as gamer expectations continue to rise with the tide of technology. This was no exception with the Moregames team;

” Memory was the biggest nightmare. You never know how much RAM the user has, but we set 35 mb as the limit. Initially it was about 60, and it worked fine on my iphone, but I know that if I use more than 35mb, some users will experience crashes due to low memory. So you have 35 Mb, 8 of which are used by the framework.”

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Stemming for Pavel’s previous experience with coding for Window Mobile platforms, he came across memory limitations as well, but not to this extent. To encompass problematic issues that can occur with memory allocation, the team put this to a test between Orions: Legend of Wizards which was originally coded for a 16mb Windows Mobile platform and then ported to the iPhone. Unfortunately initial tests were not as successful as hoped; the original dry run consumed 80 mb of ram essentially killing all resources on the iPhone due to low memory.

” Another big problem is that you don’t have a tool to analize memory corruptions. There’s a mediocre Instruments with Leak detector, but it doesn’t even tell the line where leak happened. I can write behind or beyond the array, and noone will ever notice, and then some of the users experience crashes or glitches. “

Preserving the ‘Keep it simple’ mantra Pavel approached enemy A.I. in a very straight forward manner. Basically the A.I. behaved in one of two ways’ the enemy takes the shortest path towards the player character and attacks until either of them dies. Even if Pavel stated that this wasn’t his proudest achievement, it does accomplish the job. And because there’s so much happening on the screen at any given time, I’m sure many gamers will forgive or even overlook this fact while playing.

When it came to polycounts for characters, I was quite surprised to learn that they ranged from 6000 polys for the werewolves to a respected 8500 polys for the main character. Whereas weapons ranged from 500 polys to a whopping 30,000 polycount for the minigun alone! Given the amount of action of the screen as previously mentioned, it put to rest any skepticism I had towards iPhone capabilities.
Textures sizes were rather tame as Andrey used mainly 256*256 sheets, and a 2D layered backdrop for the environment; the lanterns being the only 3D object in the environment.

The dynamic duo

Published by Chillingo, one of the leading publishers of iPhone games and apps, developer Moregames Entertainment has once again proved that a large scale team isn’t always necessary in today’s gaming market; consisting of only two members, programmer Pavel Kupriyanov who managed all of the coding duties and most of the game design and logic whereas Andrey Kovalchuk created all art assets as well as the animations for each moving element on screen.

Priced at a very moderate $0.99, it would appear that the iPhone developers cater to the casual audience, but Pavel was quick to question the term ‘causal’, and apparently iPhone developers have set a new standard in terms of pricepoint and what fun could be had at said price;

” Is it casual? To me, Appstore looks pretty core.”

Hidden beneath its simplicity, one of the coolest features I came across while playing the game was the Perk system, it was very reminisicent of those you would find in Fallout 3, where additional abilities are chosen by the player to give strategic boosts to your gameplay, for example ‘Fieldrunner’ is a perk that allows you to walk faster around the environment. Perks definitely give the game a unique flavour and depth that would keep gamers coming back for more.

With that said, no game is ever fully complete, and even though Pavel and Andrey had a clear vision that iDracula won’t become a Diablo clone Pavel did have some additional ideas that will come to bear within the following weeks.
For fans of the game, a promised update from the developers will have some exciting new features and game modes such as more unique levels, weapons, monsters and perks. In addtion you can also expect an implementation of a leaderboard style tracking system that would spur the much needed competitive nature in all of us.

” Since this game became so popular, we are pretty sure we will continue with more iDraculas. We have plans for a sequel, with more RPG-ish gameplay, levels, progression, and some kind of a story. Lots of people ask for coop gameplay over wifi, so we’ll probably make one. Not sure yet if the sequel would be like Diablo, or more like a SmashTV, probably something in between. “

I would like to thank the MoreGames team Pavel Kupriyanov & Andrey Kovalchuk along with Chillingo for taking the time out to conduct this tech review. Best of luck in future endeavors.

Braaaains… Zombieville USA: Tech review

lildragon — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:53:01 +0000

Zombies’ zombies never change, and yes we’ve all seen them before in a variety of incarnations, but any true zombie fan will continue to salivate in anticipation to set out on yet another adventure dispensing the hurt on the shambling cannon fodder known as the undead.

MikaMobile, the small development team behind Zombieville USA debuts with an impressive foray in the never-ending fight for survival against the legions of undead. To find out how it was all done behind the scenes, I got in contact with artist Kelli Noda at MikaMobile.

Finding inspiration in others

Inspired by the likes of Castle Crashers and Alien Hominid, MikaMobile set out to create a title that was a simple but nicely illustrated survival shooter with every gamers’ favorite enemy’ Zombies!
As an iPhone developer, one of the first tasks is deciding on the scope of the project, not only to protect your small team from over exertion, but to also make the game a fun experience in the shortest amount of time due to the nature of the iPhone platform. And yes although the iPhone is capable of grand scale games such as gameloft’s Hero of Sparta, it is crucial that when starting out on a much smaller team, discretion is duly advised. If fact here’s what Kelli had to say on the subject;

‘I guess I would say that I was trying to think of a game that fit the iPhone well, and could be completed with a very small team in a short time frame. We also wanted to make something visually striking and stylish. We decided on an arcade style, survival based game so we could focus on making high quality art, as opposed to large amounts of it. Especially for the handheld market, I think you’re best served making a fun and simple sandbox for your player to mess around in for a few minutes at a time, rather than spending a lot of time and energy making consumable content that is used up and discarded.”

Having been in development for roughly a month, Zombieville USA made its appearance on the Apple store earlier this month.

Simplicity in design

One of the more notable aspects of Zombieville appears not only in the visual quality of the contents but in the animation of the characters themselves, moving your ‘hero’ character across the screen as he plugs the shambling undead is a pleasure. When asked about the simplicity in the controls Kelli went on to say;

“‘When it comes to game controls on the iPhone, you pretty much have two tools – touch control, and accelerometers. I decided early on that accelerometer control is simply too floaty and imprecise for a fast paced action game, so I opted to go with a purely touch-based interface.
I spent some time just holding an iPhone sideways and imagining how different button layouts would feel. The two arrows and a big spacebar-like fire button between them felt very natural to me.’

Keeping with simplicity, it was apparent that the A.I. shared the same qualities, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially when exposing your game to the causal market. The zombies are deceptively simple at first, by evaluating their distance from the player allowing them to shamble towards the player until they die, or claw you to death. Simple yes, but there is strength in numbers and as you progress they can become quite the bullet sponges.
Regarding design and aesthetics, one thing I would’ve liked to have seen is differentiating colors in the zombies as they become stronger or faster, even a slight color hue change in a faster or stronger enemy would not only add visual diversity but also add a slight strategic element to the game play.

{click image for larger view}

Outsmarting the iPhone

When developing for a platform such as the iPhone, they’re many facets that come into play; not only do you have to be cautious of your final game size, but also how your application plays with the limited resources and processing power it would adequately need to accomplish what you would like to see game design wise.

Software wise, the Mika team used a small selection of standard industry tools. All content was drawn in Corel Painter followed by touchups in Photoshop and cleverly textured the created art onto geometry planes in Maya, essentially making it very easy to animate with Maya’s robust animation toolset. Once all the assets where created, the Unity 3D engine was then used to tie it all together. When I asked Kelli about the Unity Engine, she stated this;

‘Unity is a pretty great package, and we certainly couldn’t have built Zombieville in such a short time without it. Our team comes from an art background, so it’s very helpful for us to have an artist friendly tool that streamlines so much of the development process. The asset pipeline in particular is commendable.’

Hardware wise the team used an ancient Wacom Intuos (Kelli’s words, heck I’m still using a 4 x 6 graphire at home!), an iPhone and a Mac.

Aesthetically speaking, MikaMobile found a delicate balance between art and performance; as any artist or programmer in the industry will tell you; these two philosophies rarely meet throughout production!
As previously mentioned, all assets where created in Corel Painter and Maya, the main character was composed of 7 textured quads, one for each body part, and one for the muzzle flash that comes from his gun. The zombies consisted of a slightly higher polycount weighing in at 10 quads a piece; this was due to the fact that their hierarchy also included 4 blood splatter effects.

‘Again, keeping the draw calls low was a main concern for us, so incorporating some of our needed effects directly into the characters bodies was helpful.”

Environmentally, the polycounts where even more primitive, consisting of 2 polys per house and roughly 10 polys for other screen assets.
According to Kelli, when it came to the texture sizes they appeared to not have much of a performance hit on the platform. Realizing this they kept most of the textures relatively high to make them appear as crisp as possible. The largest textures used were for the backdrops and main menu, which allotted 512 512 texture space. Characters are 128 128, and the houses where slightly higher at 256 512. Additionally all elements in the UI were comprised of a single 512 512 texture which includes the store you encounter between each level.
So with that said, during my play through I rarely encountered any frame rate drops, the iPhone handled the on screen elements quite easily even with scores of baddies on screen.

{click image for larger view}

Technically speaking, the only hurdles the team came across were not surprisingly enough, the optimization of the game for the iPhone platform. According to Kelli this was a tricky task;

‘Optimizing for the iPhone is pretty tricky, and we had to pull some interesting tricks in order to display the copious amounts of gore you see on screen constantly. The dozens of particle effects you see in the game are actually all one skinned mesh, attached to dozens of bones that are being animated via script. This allowed us to have a huge amount of blood and guts all rendered in a single draw call.’

Not only was optimizing for the platform a new experience for MikaMobile, submitting to Apple for the first time was a nerve-wracking exercise in and of itself, since it required them to muck around under the hood in an unfamiliar territory call xCode. This was all in order to make the build distribution ready.

‘Something that we had practically zero experience with since Unity was making everything fool-proof for us. But thankfully we followed the dozens of steps Apple has on their developer portal, and managed not to screw anything up.’

As you can see, the process for creating applications can be both rewarding and sometimes time-consuming, but with the abundance of help available, you won’t be stuck for too long.

The small but capable MikaMobile

It’s always an inspiration for indie developers and the like to find out they’re not alone when it comes to team sizes, and the fact that they can in part perform the same tasks themselves.
MikaMoible consists of three members, artist and animator Kelli Noda, her partner programming behind the scenes and calling all the shots as acting CEO and company logo, Mika their pet kitty.

Though Zombieville would appear to be a causal game for the market, Mika intentions weren’t so focused;

‘The goal with Zombieville was mostly just to make a fun game that we enjoyed, I wasn’t even sure if we’d ever release it or not! We certainly weren’t targeting the traditional ‘casual’ market, or any established, successful genre. If we were thinking along those lines, it probably would have been a tower defense game with a lower-case i somewhere in the
name! ’

Some ideas the team had in mind where mentioned earlier in the article but had to be left on the cutting room floor in order to not have instances of ‘feature creep’. In upcoming updates to Zombieville, the team has plans for the fans of the game to have reason to be gitty over. You can expect to see varying types of zombies and environments, different difficulty option amongst other additions are all considerations moving forward.
With the warm reception to the game, Mika was expecting quality feedback from their consumers, and the demand for tweaks, further optimization and content are top of the list going forward.

I would like to thank Kelli Noda and her team at MikaMobile for taking the time out to conduct this tech review. Best of luck in the future.

Related links:
Zombiville USA – Get it now
MikaMobile

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