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Originally Posted by Faille  awesome, congratulations!
was thinking of working on some iphone type apps this year once I brush up on my programming, so I'll be back with many questions!
What was some of the hardest parts of making the game, and what were some of the hardest parts of the process in getting it approved and what not? |
Thanks!
I handled all of the art/sound/UI and a lot of the design. My friend handled all of the programming/pipeline/marketing.
From my point of view, the hardest thing was coming up with something that we thought other people would be interested in. It's so different from 'major' game development as you only have a small sliver to deliver to people, so it's gotta be a good sliver.
We initially started messing around with a 'Missile Command' type game (that old school trackball arcade game.)
But then I thought we needed something unique and would maybe stir up a little controversy without being offensive. So zombies about to eat kids sounded about right.
That, the RnD, and then the final stages of polish were probably the largest pains.
As for the application process, I was pleasantly surprised. I had read nightmares about how it was taking some devs like 3 months to get accepted. At the very least we heard the average was 2-3 weeks. Not sure if it was how cleanly my friend filled out the application, but we submitted a week ago Sunday, and it was up on the store late saturday night. So only 6 days!
We're waiting approval on a free 'lite' version of the game right now.
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Originally Posted by Zarcath grats dude! will download it later and check it out.
Curious to know if you came across any unexpected limitations, size of the game, hardware limitations, doing the leaderboards?
What type of return in investment are you guys projecting? |
I was INCREDIBLY surprised at how flexible the iPhone was, and we really didn't come across anything that hindered us. Well so long as we weren't expecting Crysis graphics.
However the few things that were limiting:
- Our game has a LOT of creatures on the screen at once, so all of my zombies are only roughly 300 polys.
- Skinning a character is expensive, so everything is segmented. I tried to hide it as best I could.
- FX, this one may be unique to us, but because we had so many characters we couldn't afford to do tradional FX. So instead we went with an animated billboard system, which in the end worked out fantastically.
We really didn't project any sort of return in investment for 2 reasons.
1) We didn't invest anything other than the 100$ for the dev kit.
2) It's such a random market right now. There really is no way to project anything based off of previous games. Some of the worst games have the best sales, and other than grass roots marketing, I can't figure out why.
