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DEV-LOG: THEM App Development Pt.2

Posted on 06. Oct, 2010 by admin in AV-Log, Featured

THEM by Glacier Games

Design, development and lessons learned.

Phillipe Girouard takes us through the graphic development of his soon to be released app ‘THEM’, from pencil and pad to digital originals.

Part 2 takes a look at the coding involved and problems he faced with Unity.

THE DETAILS

The words

Welcome to Part 2 in our series of looking at Glacier Studios design process for the soon to be released app ‘THEM’

Having sorted out most of the character designs on paper and in his head, it was time to starting look at the coding.

Phillipe had some coding knowledge already that, by his own admission, was rusty at best. Sitting himself down for a weekend he completed several Unity tutorials, threw himself into forums and attached himself to the Unity Scripting Reference sheet.

“I constantly had the Unity scripting reference page open and kept referring to it when I got stuck.”

However most problems were solved by people online. By building up a network through Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin and posting questions Phillipe was able to get answer almost immediately.

“Using the Unity Forums was essential to figuring out little problems that I was facing.”

“These social networks also helped with another problem, promotion! Posting game development updates, images, etc. on these various networks helped get the word out about THEM. Without that connection, no-one would have heard about THEM!”

In the end, the biggest challenge faced was everybody’s old archenemy – ‘Time’ (cue thunderous stormy weather and a far off scream!!!)

Being a one-man band, small problems seemed bigger than they actually were and even with strong support from the online Indie Dev community, the troubles starting mounting. At this point an executive decision was made.

“Every feature that I had (listed and itemized for production) I asked myself if it really added to the gameplay or not. If it wasn’t a core feature then I would simply cut it out. That way I could focus on the most important parts of the game, get them done, and then see if I had time left to implement things I had cut out.”

This may have unintentionally been a pay off to people buying the app. With a load of extra features still not implemented, it’s going to prove to be an update bonanza for early buyers of THEM. New features to be included in later updates include helicopters, vehicles, new enemy types, themed backgrounds… the list goes on.

“I have been working on a ton of those cool features that won’t make the initial release, but will make it into the game through a robust update release schedule. Although I was bummed out that I couldn’t include some cool features that I wanted for the game, I can now work them into the game after the release and simply send out an update to all my users.”

Good news for buyers all-round. THEM looks like it’s going to be a unique, stylish app that we love to see come out from Indie Devs. The best thing of all is that it’s an app piloted by a dedicate developer who has long-term plans of growing the initial idea.

Keep an eye out for Part III of our series on THEM… a SNEEKPEEK video to be shown on AppVader first!

Tags: Design, dev, developer, Development, Game, Indie

Reviewed by: admin

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