Going Mobile

The iPhone / iTouch is a platform that I believe should excite all indie game developers.

For me its the idea that its probably the closest thing I can get to developing a game for the Nintendo DS (a fabulous hand held console). Also with nearly every iPhone out there being connected to the AppStore there is plenty of potential for a good game to make some dough.

But first you need a game idea - no biggie - Dennis one of my developer friends, a level designer at Guerilla Studios working on Killzone 2, had been bugging me for a while to help him make a RPG. Handheld console? RPG? Two experienced game developers, especially one art type and one programmer type? Let the fun begin.

Fast forward to less than two weeks later - we have a working iPhone game engine (built from scrap by myself), a working art pipeline (again built by me), and a highly detailed design document.

The Engine
Creating the engine has been an interesting experience considering before this project I had never even owned a Mac, let alone programed anything on it. The first part was obviously fronting the money to get one - but as a passionate game developer money is not an obstacle to my game.

We first thought Torque for the iPhone could be a great tool to help speed our progress along but when we discovered it was not immediately available we knew that to get our game done we would have to create an engine ourselves.

Currently the engine supports loading / displaying levels and models, cameras, lights, animation, and detecting which object(s) have been touched by the player.

The Art Pipeline
A major consideration in the design of the engine was how we are going to create content for our first iPhone / iTouch game and hopefully make it easy for future games as well.

Fortunately, Dennis knew exactly what he wanted from me for the art pipeline. Basically "I want to be able to use .fbx files as levels". Currently we can import .fbx files into MilkShape 3D and export them to our custom level format using a plugin I wrote - eventually I hope the progress can be more automatic.


Above: A basic test level in Milkshape 3D. Below: The same level in the engine on the iPhone simulator.


Another great feature of our art pipeline is that we can use "dummy" objects to represent a camera or other special objects and they will be handled correctly by the exporter so that the engine can handle them.

Speedy?
If you have read this far maybe you have gotten the feeling that this is an awful lot of progress in a time frame of less than two weeks - and I think you are right (but maybe I'm bias). How are we working so fast?

1) Have a plan. Before a single line of code was programmed Dennis and myself had a ton of brainstorm sessions, asked each other questions about the game that we had to find answers to, researched other similar games, and said what we wanted the game to be.

The result was a design document that is very useful. Want to know how the player will move around the world? Its in the design document. Want to know how combat works (ex: can I attack and use abilities on the same turn)? Its in the design document. Want to know what options you have in the main menu? Yep, you guessed it - its in there.

2) Experience. This is far from our first game. I have never touched XCode, Objective-C or an iPhone before this project but because I have programmed countless games in several difference languages I had a firm grasp on the language by Day 2. In addition, Dennis obviously has experience in the main stream industry that can provide extremely useful insights.

3) Team composition. They may be only two of us (so far) but we work well together. Dennis and myself have work together on spur of the moment type games for the past couple years and have a great friendship. Additionally, Dennis is an artist type that has a technical mind while I am a programmer type with a creative mind.

Until Next Time - Good Luck on All Your Projects!