Me, iTorque & The Mouse Bros

I'm a lurker. For the most part I do not post on the forums. Having just finished a year and a half long project with iTorque, I thought I would take a few minutes and try my hand at a blog posting. Although this is in part shameless self promotion, I thought I'd talk about my experience from starting cold with iTorque through to having my game go live on the app store.

My Background

I first started making games in the early eighties in basic on my atari 400, and later the C64. As an adult I worked in television production as a sound engineer, editor, 3d artist, and producer. I returned to making games as a hobby around 1999 after learning Macromedia Director for a clients interactive video presentation. In the back of the book I used, I found a tutorial called 'Sprite Invaders' which taught you how to use lingo script to make a basic Invaders game. By the time I was killing my first sprites I was completely addicted again.

Between 2000 and 2006 I continued to play with director, as well as trying out other packages like Dark Basic, and Flash. Mostly just making clones of vintage arcade games for my own amusement. In 2006 I was hired as a Flash developer at a local animation studio where I worked in a variety of roles on projects for a number of large studios but primarily as an actionscripter on games for the NFLRush and NFL Rush Zone. I was there till 2009 when cut backs led to being laid off.

Getting Started

I formed a partnership with an artist friend with the intention of creating mobile games, and in december of 2009 we incorporated "Game Radiator". We looked at using Unity but we are primarily interested in 2D games, and it was apparent early that iTorque was the tool for us. I bought the software and a MAC book and set about learning how to use it. When I set out I was using torsion in a vmware window and although torque script came to me very easily I just couldn't seem to get the hang of using the engine and I was initially very frustrated. Things just didn't seem to work right and things that seemed to worked one day didn't the next. I forget which version number this was I think maybe 1.3, but I just couldn't get anywhere.

Now being a lurker I'm not really one for asking for help, but I do spend a fair amount of time searching through the forms, and I eventually came across a post that said several things just didn't work right on the OSX version that would under windows. The next day I started by getting set up on a windows machine, and suddenly almost everything I did was working. I finally started working on our game instead of fighting to learn my tools.

Making a Game

While I was learning the engine I had been playing with assets borrowed from a small flash prototype that my partner and I had made the previous winter called Mouse Bros. The flash version of Mouse Bros had been something we did over a weekend for fun and wasn't a very polished game. We put it online with Mochi Ads and didn't really expect it to do much, which it didn't. Having recreated the basic game play already on the iPhone we felt it made a fun accelerometer game and we started developing the idea in more detail. This is when I started to really like TGB, the editor made it easy to mock up levels different ways and protoype and play our ideas quickly. I was still annoyed however by having to switch back and forth between Boot Camp XP for working on the game and OSX for testing on the device, but we were moving forward and that's all that was in the end all that mattered.

I would like to point out at this point that now I'm using 1.4.1 and no longer need a windows partition the problems I used to have on OSX are only a memory. I'm using Xcode for all my scripting and for engine changes.

At some point around christmas I began messing around with making source code changes to the engine itself, I'm not really a programmer in that sense and this was a real challenge to me. Frustration returned with the huge list of errors I was generating while trying to add in open feint. I learned some Objective C and some C++ and was able to add in open feint support, as well as additional alx functions using info I found on the forms. I have also been able to create several of my own console functions, as well as change certain gui elements to work more the way I wanted for Mouse Bros.

I spent a long time optimizing the performance and debugging the game, as well I ended up having to create most of the GUI design and assets and at points felt I would never finish. For the last 3 months I started each Monday morning thinking I should definetly be able to submit by this weekend only to find Friday would come and I'd not be done. There always seemed to be something needing more polishing, or some odd bug popping up in my scripts or something we felt needed to be added.

Early in the morning on June 30th, I successfully uploaded my binary to iTunes connect and began the wait. On July 6th Mouse Bros finally went live.

Conclusions

Overall in the end I'm very pleased with our results and with iTorque, now that I know how to use it (well I still have lots to learn about it I'm sure) I'm looking forward to turning out our next titles on a faster schedule. If your out there still struggling to finish your game keep at it you will reach the end.

Thanks to this community for being out there to help those of us lurking in the shadows. With out you I wouldn't have got there.