indieSpring Week [Day One]

By Rob September 22, 2009

At indieSpring we have lots of ideas about new games and projects. In fact, we have so many, the difficulty is in completing any of them to a high enough standard to release. I decided it was high time that changed, so I've taken one week off work to concentrate on indieSpring and our two current projects - chainWorks and Fluttr.

chainWorks has been kicking around for some time at GG, almost five years in fact. It's come a long way since then, and has passed from every single iteration of T2D from its release. Fluttr is a simple casual game, designed to be a quick 2 minute personal challenge. You can see it in action here in the video below:

Both games have always been targeted at a PC, Mac and iPhone releases; both games have been in an advanced prototype stage but never "polished". I am hoping this week to:

  • Complete both games
  • Polish all assets and optimize performance
  • Port both games to the iPhone
  • Release both games early next week on PC and Mac
  • Submit both games to the app store

I started, as usual, with the most exciting part! I grabbed iTGB and spent Sunday getting my head around the new engine, how it worked, the new workflow and processes. iTGB is still in BETA, and documentation is virtually non-existent. That said, after about 9-12 hours I felt I knew enough to actually start working with the product.

Today, Monday, was spent porting the basic engine to the new platform. Various bugs and issues came up with the engine. Firstly dragging didn't work, which took some time to fix and required me to learn some Objective-C and cococa touch stuff. Then particle effects were missing, which took much longer to fix than it should have!

In the end though I have Fluttr Beta 1 ported to iPhone with only one outstanding issue, which I'm hoping to fix this week. You can check it out below:

Fluttr from indieSpring Studio on Vimeo.

If you want to play Fluttr now - you can! Head over to the Fluttr page, sign up and download for free! I'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts on the forum.