On Developing - 28 Nov 2009

By Lucas Menge on Misc

So right now I'm working alongside Lucas Marinho and Pedro Almeida on some new concepts for another game of ours. Two, actually! I can't talk much about it. But it's been fun, so far. To add to that, I even have another project of my own that uses the same basic engine as the games I'm developing alongside the dinamic duo. Honestly, I don't know what I'm more excited about!

Undead Attack! Pinball

We've submitted an update to the Worldwide and to the Lite version of Undead Attack! Pinball to the app store this Thursday and I hope to see it up by next week or so. It's mostly bugfixes and bringing the Lite version up to the full version in terms of features. The Brazilian version is doing great as well and I've been loving every minute we spend at the top of the Paid chart in the Brazilian App Store. I can only thank everyone so much for their continued support. Non-stop 5-star ratings, top of the charts and being able to compete with NDrive and TomTom in terms of gross revenue all togheter is something we hoped for, but didn't quite know if it'd happen.

About simultaneous development

Developing two simultaneous prototypes is an interesting experience. We're sharing a common engine that was mostly developed by yours truly. So we had to figure out how to share that code efficiently. The first thought was a shared library - or in Apple's terms: a Framework. On the iPhone, however, you can't dynamically link to a Framework, according to the SDK rules. However, Xcode provides ways of linking with a static library. We aren't using that, because the base engine is being developed at full speed alongside t he main project, so we just decided that, in order to make it easier for both parties involved in the coding to add/remove/fix things in the main engine, we'd just make a repository for the engine and add the code itself to the main project. That'd make debugging much more straightforward.

The thing I like the most about this whole experience, however, is that I can develop something on one end and @lmarinho can develop something else on his end. We aren't too tied together like we were in UA!P. In UA!P we had a big delay halfway through the project that was caused by him travelling to solve some family business. No one in the rest of the team could move forward because he'd stayed in charge of the entire physics of the game. And since that wasn't working so well at the time, we couldn't develop the pinball tables properly.

Now things are different. These projects have much smaller tasks for each and set up in a way that if one fails to complete their task, then the other can take over.

Our main goal, as I see it, is to have at least one of these two games ready for prime time in Q1 2010. I'm really excited about them and I hope that they'll be just as we intend them to be by that time. My other smallish project is due this year. But more on that one in another blog post!