MGT's iPhone Development

I haven't posted a blog in a long time so thought I would update with some iPhone Development experience and what we have so far.



We got into the whole iPhone craze by porting our old TGB game Kachinko to iTGB 1.0/1.1. This took some time as we had to convert most of the scripting code from the old game to C++ because at that time iTGB did not have as many optimizations as it does now plus kachinko is very demanding with so many balls possible on the screen.

You can checkout Kachinko in the appstore at: Kachinko and Kachinko Lite.

A really nice thing about using iTGB for our first game was the fact that I already knew the platform, could keep myself away from Objective C since I had never used it at the time, and just focus on any device / app store issues that would arise. (and they did)



Thom Robertson has been a friend of Max Gaming for a while now, and the iPhone platform let him build his games on Windows and let us publish them on the iPhone for him. Enter our second iPhone engine. We took Thom's windows Engine he has been making his shooters and other games on and wrote a iPhone layer for it so once he was ready with his game build I could just recompile on iPhone and we could all test it out. This experimenting brought about our next iPhone published game Gunrazor. Gunrazor was also the first time we experimented with the social library OpenFeint, which we now use in most of our games because it allows for online scores, achievements, etc. and is very simple to integrate it in your own code or in iTGB. Gunrazor currently sits at version 1.1 and we are working on getting version 1.2 out the door which will bring Achievements as well as some other enhancements.

You can checkout Gunrazor in the appstore at Gunrazor



Of course like everyone I am sure, we were flooded with ideas to bring to the platform. The nice thing about iphone development and using a product like iTGB is it lets anyone in your team with some scripting knowledge build prototypes without having a mac or a device. So after serveral prototype ideas from Matt Mitman he ended up finishing Jounce to be released on the iPhone. Jounce was our first published game to use iTGB 1.2 which offered a much better scripting experience than 1.0 did. Jounce was initially release as a very simple physics game that we thought fit well on the platform as a few minute time waster while waiting in line somewhere with your iPhone. After it was released it got a lot of people wanting more and was featured on Apple's new and noteworthy list. After taking input from the customers of Jounce, we released 1.1 which features customization, speed improvements, OpenFeint, and lots of other nice enhancements.

You can checkout Jounce in the appstore at Jounce and Jounce Lite



During this time we also had Guy Zimbardi who is a programmer that does contract work for us from time to time work on a game we had done on PC but that was never published. This game was also written in TGB and before that it existed as a non torque based game written by Keith Frampton titled Twin Distress. The TGB port of the game had a new art direction along with a name change but the base gameplay was still there. Porting it to iTGB was a pretty straight porting process but we did have to move a few time critical functions into C++ to keep framerate going well, beyond that Rune Match is written completely in Torque Script on iTGB 1.2. Rune Match was also the first time we experimented with some iPhone OS 3.0 features like allowing the user to play their playlists from their itunes library while playing the game.

You can checkout Rune Match in the appstore at Rune Match and Rune Match Lite



Matt Mitman was showing me an Xbox XNA project he was working on for halloween titled Pumpkin Chop that allows you to carve a pumpkin in 3d and then view it in a 3d scene of a corn field or house steps. I thought it was a good idea and decided to bring the game to the iPhone as well. I had a very short time to get it up and on the appStore so I stuck with a 2d interface where you draw with your finger on the pumpkin, it takes the points you draw and builds a 2d mesh out of them. Then you can reposition the mesh on the pumpkin surface and then carve it out of the pumpkin using a simple algorithm that removes pixel from the bitmap that exist inside the mesh. The pumpkin consists of 3 layers of images which allowed me to cut the shape out at different locations to give it a 3d carved look. Since I didn't have the time to do a show off mode like the XNA version has, I thought it would be a good idea to let the user export a black and white stencil template from the game into their iPhone's photo library so it could be transferred to their computer for printing. If you look at the screenshots on the app store, the primary screenshot is in game, and the next screenshot after it is the template that was exported. There are a lot of pumpkin carving apps on the iphone and I thought maybe being able to export and carve a real pumpkin that matches your virtual pumpkin design was a good idea to set it apart.

You can checkout Pumpkin Chop in the appstore at Pumpkin Chop

While it has been fun making all of these little games for the iPhone, its always nice to make money as well. Unfortunately like a lot of people we have not had any real hits yet to write home about. From what we have observed its really about getting your game out in front of people since the apps are so cheap and the store is so flooded and the lists on the appstore definitely help with that. Our best sales came when Jounce was in the new and noteworthy listing for a week. We of course are still looking for ideas to help get recognition in the app store if anyone has found some gems they want to share. Overall its been lots of fun working on these small projects and feels good to get back into 2d development after we have been doing 3d development so much. Unfortunately they haven't paid off enough to do full time development on iPhone titles but they do offer some fun projects for free time.

At least now for the future we are not giving up on the App Store. We have a couple more games in the works now and have some more ideas to test the store with.