Click the above links to see the apps in Apple's App Store!
I've finally completed my first mobile game, The Last Thumb Fighter! It has been seven months in the making. I should really spend more time writing apps...
Anyway, it's done, and instead of talking about what it is, I'm going to let you go check it out above. For those that are interested, I'm going to talk a bit about development.
It all began with a simple thought. That thought was, "Y'know, I love playing games with my friends, and there's no game that you could just pop out when you're hanging out at a bar and play with each other." Of course, there probably are some out there, but who has the time to search the app store for them?
So, that got me thinking about how you might play a game with your friends, and I stumbled upon this idea of holding the device between the two of you, each with one thumb on it. Everyone I described this two had the same feedback, "That would be awkward, and there's not enough room for it." And every time I got this feedback, I pulled out my iPod and made them hold it between us, and it just works.
That's gave birth to the idea, and shortly thereafter I began the prototype. The first iteration was just two circles shooting circles at each other. There was no game there, but the interaction just felt so right. You can judge for yourself whether or not the game's a success, but I think that regardless of how you feel about the overall product, you'll agree that interaction is successful.
From there, development went remarkably smoothly. I took the lessons of my last project into this and made a list of all the things I need to do, and one by one, I implemented each item and checked it off the list.
I hit a few stumbling blocks, from which I learned a few things, which I will share with you now.
1. Corona handles drawn images better than circles. With just a few newCircle calls, you can bring your app to its knees. Fortunately, there's an easy solution: draw your circles in your favorite paint program and use them instead. I recommend doing this early on because there are some subtle differences in how you handle the two, and it's no fun searching and replacing all the circles in your code.
2. Corona's button widgets are odd. They seem to be built for single interactions. You'll notice that before the co-op and multiplayer, you and your friend can select your ships at the same time. This created some funky bugs where the input bounced back and forth between simultaneously clicked buttons, resulting in the ship selections changing randomly. I ended up scrapping Corona's buttons in favor of my own. It turns out, my custom class was pretty easy to write. It's not as fully featured, but it gets the job done.
3. Sound is hard. There are definitely some little gotchas in implementing sound. Take a very careful look at how the samples work when you write your own. I actually learned much more about this when I created the update for Wizard's Magic Ball, but more on that later. However, what I'm really talking about is writing music. I haven't ever done that before, and I learned as much or more about sound than I did about everything else in this project. At some point, I'll have to do a post about how I write and record music.
4. Corona is remarkably easy to upgrade and well documented. No, this wasn't a stumbling block, but it helped me through several. I upgraded Corona once during this project when the New iPad came out, and there was a tiny change (for the better) to the button widget. That was the only thing I had to change. And throughout the project, I relied heavily on Corona documentation, which is fantastic. Great documentation can make up for many faults in an SDK.
And there you have it. There's so much more I could say about this project, but I'm not sure what would be useful or interesting to someone stumbling across this blog. I'm sure I'll be mentioning it often in the future (assuming I do more than a single blog post per release). If you've read this far and you have questions, fire away. I'd love to start a dialogue about indie game development.
P.S. I'm not one for taking away dev time to write blogs, but I have the upgrade to Wizard's Magic Ball and my adventures with other SDKs like Moai to talk about in the future, so barring any unforeseen laziness (or more likely, busyness making apps), look forward to posts about those in the future.
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