30 Weeks of Game Development

30 Weeks of Game Development(uberent.com)

221 points by seattlematt 13 years ago | 40 comments

GuiA 13 years ago |

Awesome, thanks for posting!

It's interesting how the core game was basically finished very early on (week twelve or so), and then the rest of it was "just" polish. So in this case, the proverbial last 20% are really 60% of the work.

selter01 13 years ago | |

I would say polish/bug fixing should be closer to 50% than 20%.

uber_neutrino 13 years ago | | |

I usually call it the first 90% and the second 90%.

erikstarck 13 years ago |

Great insight into the effort needed to build a game. I'm counting 19 man months of work. With an average yearly salary of $80'000 and a sales price of $0.99 the game needs to sell roughly 180'000 copies to pay for development.

dheerosaur 13 years ago | |

I think they will have in-game purchases, like coins etc.

yeureka 13 years ago |

Great work guys! I am writing a game with my friends on our spare time and we have kept all the builds since the beginning so we could document it's progress with a video as well. Glad to see that people respond well to this. Wish you the best of luck!

ronyeh 13 years ago |

Congrats! Can you elaborate on this point?

    Despite being an iOS game 95% of development was done on PC.

Was it a C++/OpenGL game that had a small iOS AppDelegate / GLKit / UIKit / etc scaffold?

forrestthewoods 13 years ago | |

You nailed it. Almost entirely C++/OpenGL with platform specific code only as necessary. I count 7 iOS specific files and they're all fairly small. What you mentioned plus interfaces for analytics, in-app purchases, game center, and profiles.

networked 13 years ago | | |

>Almost entirely C++/OpenGL with platform specific code only as necessary.

Well, I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next Humble Bundle, then. :-)

Could you elaborate on your use of analytics: how did you handle pre-release testing and what were you most surprised to learn from the data?

31reasons 13 years ago | |

Graphics and level designing takes lot of time i guess.

kenjackson 13 years ago |

Could you explain, "Despite being an iOS game 95% of development was done on PC."? Don't you need to do iOS development on a Mac?

forrestthewoods 13 years ago | |

Sure. Right now our custom tech supports Windows, OS X, Linux, and iOS. I'm most comfortable in windows so that was my personal preference. That plus the Visual Studio debugger kicks the bajeezus out of Xcode for C++.

Some features could only be worked on through OS X. Gamecenter leaderboards, in app purchases, analytics, and some UI bits. Some of those don't even work in the simulator and require an actual device.

The windows build was missing a handful of features but none of them matter for development. No full screen, no settings, hard coded resolution config, incomplete UI, etc.

kayoone 13 years ago | | |

In the screenshot below it looks like you used SublimeText instead of Visual Studio. Does it have benefits for CPP dev ?

https://outland-live.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/media/downlo...

robryan 13 years ago | |

If you are programming directly in objective-c then it will likely require using a mac. iOS games are often done in things like Unity where you can cross compile to iOS and Android. For that you can get away with using a PC.

kayoone 13 years ago | |

their game engine is probably C++. As they dont need to use Apples SDK for app specific stuff like UI elements, they also dont need to use objective-c.

mkr-hn 13 years ago | |

Probably art and writing.

seivan 13 years ago |

Very cool, again thanks for sharing. I actually liked the credits snippet as well, mostly because I didn't see anyone who didn't belong there. Software Engineer, art, effects, animation and sound. Not sure what VO is.

But seems like you guys run a lean operation - and I love that. That's what most teams should be.

seattlematt 13 years ago | |

VO is voice over (the announcer). Uber Entertainment definitely runs a lean operation, with everyone wearing multiple hats. In fact, the person responsible for VO in the game happens to double as our office manager. You can check out some of the other stuff we do at http://www.uberent.com/

seivan 13 years ago | | |

That voice over was AMAZING - and as such is a skillset of it's own. I respect that.

I happy you guys don't got "game designers" who happen to be idea guys in disguise.

Keep it up, I'll pay for your stuff just because of that. The quality is just a bonus.

freefrag 13 years ago |

Great job on the game, out of curiosity why did it take 3 submissions before it finally went on the app store?

ga0bi 13 years ago | |

From reddit's r/gamedev post:

"We missed a checkbox one time for IAP and a restore purchases button the second time."

Link: http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/19vli0/30_weeks_of_...

kaoD 13 years ago |

I learn something from this: to make your character look like it's standing (instead of floating) you just need to tilt the floor a bit :P

edo 13 years ago | |

So sublte, yet so impactful on the 'feel' of the game. Really awesome.

Kiro 13 years ago | |

Where did you see that?

kaoD 13 years ago | | |

Compare 0:36 and 1:30.

NateLipscomb 13 years ago |

Congrats, thanks for sharing this.

As a game dev myself, I'd definitely love to hear more about the custom engine you used and why you chose it over the other options on the market (like Unity, which you mentioned).

forrestthewoods 13 years ago | |

It's the same engine as our much larger game, Planetary Annihilation. http://www.uberent.com/pa/ PA needs it's own engine as no off the shelf option is sufficient for it's needs.

Outland Games is a much simpler game, but the PA engine is modular enough that we could scale down to mobile. The upside is that a lot of the work for Outland Games will carry forward with the engine and help future projects (including PA).

SkittlesNTwix 13 years ago | | |

I'm on the PA Kickstarter. Looking forward to playing the finished product!

raverbashing 13 years ago |

Congratulation on this writeup (and video), this is amazing

Care to share how the team was built etc? Who's on contract, who's on the business, how did you get people to wear multiple hats?

I would have gone the way of building it on the PC and later porting it to iOS (or whatever you want) probably using SDL, oh well =)

readme 13 years ago |

Looks awesome.

Curious if you are the developer? If so, did you pay your help (graphics, sound, etc) or were they volunteers?

If so, how much should one budget to hire people for that end?

deevus 13 years ago |

Looks great. I'd love to give it a go but I don't own an iDevice. Are there plans to release to other platforms such as Android?

icefox 13 years ago |

Just curious, when you started what was the original pitch that you had for what the game would be?

dsirijus 13 years ago |

Out of interest - did you feel the sale bump after publishing the blog post and sharing it around?

biot 13 years ago |

Hm... it wouldn't let me purchase on my iPad 1: says it requires a camera. :(

Zr40 13 years ago | |

That's probably done to prevent iPad 1 owners from purchasing the game. Besides requiring iOS 6.0, requiring a camera is currently the only way to exclude the first-generation iPad.

jasonlotito 13 years ago |

How many people worked on this? What roles did they play?

bvdbijl 13 years ago | |

You can see who worked on it on the bottom of this image: https://outland-live.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/media/downlo...

sidcool 13 years ago |

Nice work. Good game. Solid graphics.

chromejs10 13 years ago |

very cool. thanks for sharing