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I always believed that computer game development was toughest thing to do as a programmer ever. As it appears — it is, and not only for programmers but for a whole team. If you plan to make a computer game, be ready to solve one of the most complex project you’ll ever face.

In this series of posts I’ll tell about my path of game engineer and designer, along with a hugely talented team made form people at 63BITS and SAKIDEAMSHENI. Every single part story will be written after few days or weeks after actual facts happened, so technically you will be victims of a successful or failed project born. This will be some soft of “Reality Show” of the blog.

Platform

iPhone OS, or simply to say — iPhone, iPod touch and now even iPad. Why? There are many reasons we’ve chosen this platform:

1. It’s a bit simpler than desktop to start. Thing is that we want to make a really high quality and exiting game, which requires huge amount of resources and manpower, which do not have. Everything we have is a enthusiasm, passion, fair enough professional knolidge and faith that it will work.
2. iPhone is one of the most successful game platform ever, it easily joins club of “Titans”: X-box, PlayStation 3, Wii and PC leaving behind PSP and GameBoy and becoming number one mobile gaming platform ever.
3. iPhone is amazingly interactive, with it’s accelerometer, digital compass, peer-2-peer networking and fairly big (and really huge on iPad) multi-touch display there is plenty of territory to innovate and make games unique and exceptional.
4. Already built, successfully running, huge and very comfortable infrastructure to sell, distribute and publish games — the App Store.
5. I have experience with iPhone development and App Store itself.
6. We love iPhone.

Team and Qualifications

At this moment I think current project team is perfectly balanced and ready for any challenges. I won’t tell you names because I do not yet have permission from them, only thing I can tell is what they will work on in this project and what I think is important for game development at this moment:

• 3D Graphics Artist for making 3D models, textures and everything static and visual.
  Every single object in game has to be designed modeled and adopted to game and platform to make game beautiful and run smoothly on given platform.
• Animation Specialist to make game characters and environment “alive”.
  Animation is crucial, it’a only single thing that makes game feel dynamic and alive, properly animated character gives you that truly involving gaming experience.
• Visual Artist or just a creative person who can draw everything that he speaks.
  Visual artists sketch and then draw everything in game: menus, levels, characters, character emotions, trees, cars, birds, weapons, everything… In our case visual artist will be also level designer too.
• Sound Engineer to make game even more interactive and “colorful” adding engine noises, jump and weapon sounds, environment aura and everything acoustic.
• Game Engineer or programmer, to glue everything up and make game actually work.
  Actually game engineers are an hard-core computer programmers with understanding of graphics, sounds, performance and everything what game needs for development.

In ideal picture will be to have an dedicated score and script writer too, but it’s a luxury small company can not afford, so the screenplay, level sketching, and this kinda tasks are solved by whole team while brainstorming.

The Plot and Style

Defining game style is number one task you have to solve, because it defines what you have to do and whom you’ll need for this project. For example: puzzle games could be done by one or two talented persons. 3D shooters need much more afford and people, like visual or 3D artists, racing games need much more mathematical and physics oriented people as long as decent 3D artists because cars/bikes/whatever are some kind of sculptures player looks at all the gameplay. Etc, etc…

After you’ve defined style you have to write a plot for a game, because games without stories behind are boring and will live up to few weeks and then everyone will forget about it and your sales will be stopped. Story behind must make game addictive, beautiful and enjoyable.

In my case this is constant process, there are tons of ideas and possibilities which makes it very hard to pick best from them all. Of course there is an ideal solution for this — you will think — accept them all, this will make game much more rich and interesting — and you’d be right, except that game would never finish, and you have to finish the game and sell it, because at some moment you’ll became hungry, tired and bored.

Our Game

I won’t tell you much about our particular game we are working on, because that’s not the point of this post and series. On the other side I don’t think I’ll keep it as a secret and will show-off some of our achievement before release of the game and tell about some interesting moments we’ve been through.

At this moment, we’ve done everything I’ve written above and currently we are testing some of our work on actual devices. We are currently working on in-game controls and character itself, including character animation and behavior. Next step will be level design.

What I want to say

Point of this series about game development is to make you look into kitchen of a small group working on a computer game. It is more of story that a technical guide how to make an iPhone game, but even so I’ll try to show a real world tips and problems you’ll face while making a game.

Coming in next part

Next part will be much more technical and will cover game-engines, and game development methodologies.