Going Back in Time

When I started in the game industry, I was one of 3 programmers in the basement of a condominium in Rockville, Maryland. The main office was too small and too quiet to hold us noisy programmers, so they stuck us in that condo to do our work.

We had our 286 PC's, we programmed in 100% assembly language, and we worked with artists that were offsite. We barely had a network - most source code was manually copied from machine to machine via sneaker-net (floppy disk, carried by hand from computer to computer). Source control? Ha! Not likely. Automated build systems? Why? You just built the game yourself, stuck it on a disk, and sent it to manufacturing.

Fast forward to 2004, and I was working with 50 person engineering teams (200+ people across all disciplines in many cases), and the code you created and maintained was very large, but a small percentage of the overall game experience. For the most part, everyone was a specialist. At least one person devoted to source/content revision control (not including IT personnel behind the scenes), and several devoted to making sure automated builds happened on a regular basis so the team's work could be reliably merged together.

I left game development for a short time, and then recently came back to it. But I didn't come back to 200+ person teams. I came back to contracting, working on a small indie team, taking our shot at a big break, and hoping that we could create a fun experience with a small team and a small budget. It's like stepping back in time.

And I love it.

Developing on the iPhone is the perfect storm for me. It's the best of the new and the best of the old, put together.

* Digital distribution (no middle man/distributor except Apple)
* Passionate users and a passionate community of developers
* Good tools and technology and relatively decent documentation
* A return to game play as the focus, not stunningly pretty graphics and deep specialization of engineers. Your game will succeed or fail on the player experience, and nothing more.
* The huge potential of a connected, mobile device like the iPhone can take social gaming to the next level.

Sure, there are problems, risks, and issues with all of the above. But this post is about focusing on the positives and potential. Plenty of time for rants later. :-)

What I'm working on...

I've been very busy working on a game with Nicole Lazzaro from XEODesign called "Tilt". It's a native conversion of the browser-based javascript game written by Joe Hewitt that won "best game" at iPhone Dev Camp in July 2007. It was the first game to use the accelerometer on the iPhone, and took advantage of a wonderful hack of the Safari browser to detect tilting of the phone. If you want to see the original game, you can play it on your iPhone here or you can play a video here:



We've now updated it with brand new artwork by Iggy Medeiros and music/sfx by Stuart Dubey. This is almost at Alpha (feature complete) at this point. Here's another Video that gives you an idea where it was in early March 2009. It's changing every day right now as we continue to polish and expand the level design. We hope to have it in the store very soon.



You can see that it's totally changed, and taking full advantage of the full iPhone SDK now. The art, music and sound have really changed the gameplay, and the daily progress has really begun to ratchet up.

I'll be posting more about some of the tech behind Tilt soon, and some of the lessons I've learned as we've developed this application.