Marble Tactics - New Game for the iPhone/iPod touch!

Marble Tactics originally began life as a Torque Game Builder game on the PC a few years back. Thanks to TGB (through the hard work of Melv and many others), Marble Tactics was finished for the PC in a relatively short amount of time and on a very modest budget.

Earlier this year, after parting ways with my previous employer (ok, the whole office was shut down), I decided to jump head first into developing games for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch. Marble Tactics naturally came to mind for my project as much of the assets I would need were already finished.

I initially contemplated using iTGB, but at the time it was still in early development. Had iTGB been further along and circumstances been a little bit different, I would definitely have used iTGB. Instead, I decided to rewrite the game from scratch.

Moving over to Xcode and Objective-C wasn't really all that painful and it didn't take too long to get up to speed. However, as with any new platform, there were a few quirks and new ways of doing things that took some time to adjust to.

In the end, what originally was planned to be a port from the PC to the iPhone ended up being a totally new game. I rewrote the entire game in Objective-C and OpenGL from scratch, redid 95% of the artwork, tweaked the audio a bit, and enhanced the gameplay. I removed gameplay elements from the PC version that I felt were superfluous, and made what was there more fun.

It was a great experience, and I'm preparing to start work on my second iPhone game.

Marble Tactics is now live on the App Store for the low price of $1.99 (USD).



For more information please visit itunes.com/app/marbletactics or www.binarygalactic.com on your computer or search for "Marble Tactics" on the iPhone App Store.

Until next time,
-Greg
www.binarygalactic.com