A Game in 2750 Days

Way back in July 2004, Phil Carlisle and I were bored. We decided that it would be quite entertaining, and just a little bit mental, to try and make a game in a day. We succeeded, blogged about it here, and then Game in a Day became kind of popular. There was, in the end, around 30 officially organised GID events and countless more private ones that still go on today. This blog is about one of the two games to be forged in the fires of that first GID.

A couple of weeks after the first GID, I wrote the following:

Quote:It's an exciting time here in the Burnt Wasp camp. Not only are we working on much cool stuff that we can't tell you about, Atoms, the game I prototyped in the first Game in a Day thing, is going to ship really soon now.

I can now officially confirm that "really soon now" means 2,750 days. That's 7 years, 6 months and 12 days; which is roughly half the development time of DNF, if you're wondering. On January 10th 2012, after 4 months of hard slog, Atoms was renamed Neutron Flux and actually shipped for the iPad. It has been a bit of a roller coaster ride getting there, so I thought it would be interesting to talk about the history of the game.

2004: After the GID

Sadly, no screenshots or code survive of the game as it was immediately after the GID. However, shortly afterwards, I roped Nauris Krauze in to make some art and we set about turning it into a proper game. I not only have screenshots from a build done around that time, but also have the code and binaries. For your viewing pleasure (or eye strain), I now present to you Atoms circa 2004.


The code is pretty crappy, slow and it really doesn't work that well at all. Nauris said recently that he doesn't like the old art either. I still kind of like the character art, but not so much the rest of it.

Late 2004: The End

After some more hackery, fiddling with art and gameplay tweaking we ended up with this. This is the last build we did before we stopped working on it. The reason for the horrible green font is that I was messing around with the font code when we stopped working on it. The horrible font was only ever meant to be temporary, but it has endured now to make some kinda nasty looking screenshots.


We have uploaded a few more screenshots from the 2004 builds to a Picasa album.

As I mentioned, after this build we shelved Atoms. The reason we shelved it was primarily because we couldn't find a way to make the game work as a desktop game. We could finish it, but we weren't really sure where best to take the game nor how best to actually sell it. There were also a plethora of technical issues due to the "engine" using SDL (badly) and being hacked together in about an hour during the GID.

2008 (or maybe 2009): Not The End Afterall

Around 2008 (or 2009, I forget), Gary Preston and I started rewriting Atoms with a view to finally finishing it and shipping. We experimented with gameplay changes and increasing the player count to 4, but in the end this version got shelved for exactly the same reason as the first one. Namely, we couldn't make it viable as a desktop game. The code did, however, get resurrected a few times as an engine test game.

2011: Enter the iPad

In 2010 we had started doing iOS development. Some of this was contract work, but there was also a game of our own. In August 2011 we had a short lull in work and I wanted to mess around with shaders, so I decided to see how long it would take to throw together a purely native iOS only engine using OpenGL ES2. The answer? About 2 weeks of evenings and weekends to get something that looks vaguely like an engine.

Since the code was meant to be an experiment in viability, I decided to port the Atoms grid code from the 2008 (or 2009) version and shaderise it. On the right is an early screenshot of the first attempt at grid rendering. It doesn't render atoms yet, but it can render player colours. If I remember correctly, this was a "tap to colour the square" type thing.

About a week or two later, we had the original gameplay more or less working using the old art. It was at this point that we decided to concentrate solely on getting the game done and shipped. To achieve this we would cut every corner and take every shortcut that we could to get things done. Nauris agreed to do the art, and soon things were looking better.


More development screenshots from the beginning through to the end are in this Picasa album.

2012: Shipped!

We were mostly finished just before Christmas, but decided to sit on it until January to give us a couple of weeks of testing. This turned out to be a good plan, because in the first week of January we found and fixed a lot of bugs. Some of these were only found through reading the code while looking for other bugs. But, on January 10th 2012 we finally shipped.



There are a few more screenshots in this Picasa album.

Despite roughly 3 weeks of doing nothing but testing and fixing bugs, a couple of obscure bugs did slip through into the first release. Yesterday, we shipped an update that resolves them as well as vastly improves the tutorial. You can buy Neutron Flux for your iPad on the App Store now.

What's Next?

Shipping is definitely not the end; it's just the beginning. This is virgin territory for us. As contractors, when the code is finished we are finished. Now we have to also do all the things that come after shipping, and we have to do it while working on the next project (which is already in full swing). It has been, and continues to be, a learning experience.

We have a fairly long list of things we'd like to do in updates, such as multiplayer. We did have multiplayer working in an early build, but we had to viciously murder it due to time constraints.

There is a lot more I'd like to write about. We've learnt a lot of things and have good advice we can impart. I'd also like to talk about our 2D art pipeline, which has evolved over 3 years and has saved us vast quantities of time. Another good blog would be about OpenGL ES debugging on iOS, which is something we had to do a lot of. This blog is already extremely long, though, and there's at least another three blog posts to cover all that.

We will be making a couple of announcements over the next couple of days, so if you're interested in what's going on then follow @BurntWasp on our shiny new Twitter account.