Escapology: from scratch to App Store in 5 days
3 October 2011 | | 0 comments
It all began around one moth ago when Split told me about Ludum Dare which is an accelerated game development event just like Global Game Jam. The main difference is that Ludum Dare is only for individuals. I remember that I was not so excited to hear that we can not enter as a team but I checked what the main theme was. An Escape. Hmm, "Sounds interesting…" I thought. But eventually I didn't decide to participate.
I think it was next day when I checked with Split again about his intention to entry the competition. That weekend he was on a tour with his band in Spain and everybody was really busy back then but he had some free time to burn before the concert so he said that he may give a try. One moment I received a message like "I am starting Xcode and creating new project". It was 9:15 PM. We discussed about the theme and came up with an idea to do some modification of old-school Pong just by using UIView or UImageView for graphics animations. But can you image an Escape Pong? Me neither so Split went with another idea which eventually turned out to be the first playable demo of Escapology. It was 10:43 PM just one and half hour later when that first version was finished! After some additional work simple level editor was ready too. Unfortunately the game didn't make it into the competition before the deadline because as you may already know - last 20% of every project takes 80% of total time. Split said that it was nice challenge but we haven't touched the code for quite some time after that day…
Now let's go "fast forward" by about three or four weeks. It was Monday and we should be working hard on our new project by we decided to take a break and Escapology sounded like a good excuse to stop thinking about multithreaded rendering and other nontrivial stuff :) So we started to work on the game again. It looked like a two days mini project… but of course we were wrong.
While the game controller was already working and it could play any level many things were still not finished. Chapter selection controller was needed to be redesigned so it could replace original but useless main menu, levels were complete mess so we had to sort them with increasing difficulty but most notably almost all game graphics were nonexistent.
Programming part was quite easy and rather fun because of Objective-C and UIKit. Of course we encountered some minor problems but everything went smoothly. Level sorting was on the other hand quite time consuming job. I am not so good with this kind of puzzle games and some of our early levels were pretty hard you know. This first batch consisted of roughly 75 levels which were divided into 5 groups. Next day we discarded some of them either because they were not interesting or because the difficulty was out of scale. To address this issue called "we need at least 100 levels" we immediately added another 30 new levels. This time including new tutorial-like puzzles which were essential for players to understand the game mechanics. Funny story was that many of my levels were impossible to solve for me but I tried hard for almost 2 hours to get them right because I wanted those levels in the game - they were too good to be discarded just because I can not beat them. Eventually I failed but after some modifications I made (their difficulty went down rapidly) they were included in the new "map pack".
Last but not least we needed an icon. Simple yet cool I said but it took almost all day to produce one which was cool enough. Designing graphics is not an easy job either - especially for amateurs like us. I think it was on Friday (but I don't remember clearly because recently we shifted our working hours from daytime to the night) when we finally sent the game to the App Store. So if I count those day correctly then we developed Escapology in 5 days. Good job don't you think?