Stage 1 out of 3

Since the first days of September two professional artists, Nikolaos Larin (Graphics/SFX) and Vicky Fysika (Music) joined the team along with three more expert advisors namely Michael Fragos (Game Design), Dimitris Fragkos (Graphics) and Christos Arapis (Promotion and Video production). The following months since the last post were somehow bussy to catch-up the deadlines, so, this post took a little more to be written.

Regarding the game, it is near the beta version release nowadays and ready to be given to beta testers ready to play it in various Apple's devices from iPhone(1) to iPhone 4 and iPod touch. The iPad version of the game will follow shortly the other devices submission to Apple's AppStore.

Among other time consuming activities, the team participated in the 3rd Hellenic Game Developers Conference (HGDC), 9-10 October during the Athens Digital Week event in Athens, Greece. The majority of the team members not only were among the organisation commitee but gave individual speeched during the two days of the HGDC. Also, Rotten Fish Games collectively made a presentation of the indie-business model that follows for building a game from concept to market the second day of the Conference.

So, being in a productive rush, the last two months were spent creating the necessary artwork like ships, bad-asses, mini-bosses, bosses, weapons, special effects, backgrounds, logos, UI, sound effects, music scores and whatever else is needed for this game. The design took a decisive turn early in September but the overall concept remained intact: the game still introduces two kind of ships but instead of the all-time classic shoot'em up mode with lasers, beams and plasma charges the main mode introduces the asteroid-management mechanics gameplay in the single player option.

Nevertheless, the late introduction of the artists in the team, caused some code implementation changes to support unexpected artwork challenges but the work pipeline suffered the least. The ideas introduced especially for the graphics lead to overall improvements of the game but especially to the frame rate in older devices that suffered low fps some times. This result supports greatly the necessity to work in a team of professionals that exchange common field knowledge. However, we went our tools usage a step further introducing Dropbox in our collection.

More about the game will be reveiled during the beta phase starting in a few days and the developers' diaries will follow shortly to offer an idea of the challenges met during the development of the game. In between, the Rotten Fish Games presentation for the 3rd HGDC will be explained as well in more details in the team's official site.

Georgios Chiotis

Space Debris, the beginning...

During an e-mail discussion in late May with Kostas Anagnostou, who is an active video-games blogger and book-writer among others, he came up with an idea: What about developing a game together. That's all it took to start working together for this iPhone game. Kostas has a deep knowledge but Apple's iPhone(tm) platform was something new to him and I had almost a year of sporadic development in that platform but nothing published yet. So, it was just the right opportunity something nice to be made and for me something to finish at last.

We started from the basics studying a series of game ideas we both had and soon we decided where we wanted to go as a concept. Then we organised the matter further in regards to documentation (GoogleDocs), tasks management (Pivotal Tracker), code synchronisation (Beanstalk), meeting arrangements (TimeBridge) and communication (Skype & IMs). In 2010, with all this technology in our disposal and all those great applications (and more others we simply do not know that exist - sorry guys!) the distance is not a problem, though, Kostas and I live in different places some hundred Km away each other. 

The only drawback with the selected platform was the initial investment in new hardware like MacOS PCs and a couple of iPhone devices. Programming SDK comes free to download and it's pretty sure we could avoid considerable expenses using a variety of graphics & sound software being available out there like GIMP, GraphicsGale, Audacity to name a few. It was something the other team members would have to worry about and we went further with the heart of our development a month later.

After a thoughtful consideration cocos2d selected as the game's engine and Tiled Map editor seemed ideal for the level design and all that. Surprising enough, both the engine and the editor matched like a charm. Nevertheless, It took another whole month to finish the design, have some technical specifications to go with and conclude the idea and the gameplay. In the mean time, we get experienced with the platform and made some more phone calls and contact friends. It looks like a small, easy to develop game but when it is appropriate to publish some more info you are going to find out a whole new experience of shoot-em-up kind.

Allow me a short paragraph before describe the last two weeks of this project. People of my age have in mind game-development stars and glorious moments of great developers that were able to write excellent code and at the same time produce marvelous graphics for their games. Nowadays, even in small & limited devices like mobiles and smartphones few people are capable of producing whatever it takes for a great game. That's only what I believe and I cannot name any of them because this era ended a decade or so ago. One-man-show is not sufficient anymore for game development, so, a team formation is the best choice. That's what we did! Not a huge team for multimillion AAA game title but small enough to be flexible and deliverables oriented. Professionalism is all about after all.

But, Kostas and I are basically coders and no matter how confident we are for our graphics and sound skills we decided to go partner with professionals ;-) Two months were more than enough to set the whole thing working and now, two weeks later, the team is full and we go for the first real game graphics and what else is missing to have something playable to showcase. There is a plan to have a version in the first couple weeks of September. Be patient since only few days are left to release this game's alpha ;-)

Stay tuned for the game's progress and support us in Facebook and Twitter (or wherever you want)!

Georgios Chiotis