
30 Weeks of Game Development - seattlematt
http://www.uberent.com/outlandgames/2013/03/08/30-weeks-of-development/
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GuiA
Awesome, thanks for posting!

It's interesting how the core game was basically finished very early on (week
twelve or so), and then the rest of it was "just" polish. So in this case, the
proverbial last 20% are really 60% of the work.

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selter01
I would say polish/bug fixing should be closer to 50% than 20%.

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uber_neutrino
I usually call it the first 90% and the second 90%.

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erikstarck
Great insight into the effort needed to build a game. I'm counting 19 man
months of work. With an average yearly salary of $80'000 and a sales price of
$0.99 the game needs to sell roughly 180'000 copies to pay for development.

~~~
dheerosaur
I think they will have in-game purchases, like coins etc.

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yeureka
Great work guys! I am writing a game with my friends on our spare time and we
have kept all the builds since the beginning so we could document it's
progress with a video as well. Glad to see that people respond well to this.
Wish you the best of luck!

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ronyeh
Congrats! Can you elaborate on this point?

    
    
        Despite being an iOS game 95% of development was done on PC.
    

Was it a C++/OpenGL game that had a small iOS AppDelegate / GLKit / UIKit /
etc scaffold?

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forrestthewoods
You nailed it. Almost entirely C++/OpenGL with platform specific code only as
necessary. I count 7 iOS specific files and they're all fairly small. What you
mentioned plus interfaces for analytics, in-app purchases, game center, and
profiles.

~~~
networked
>Almost entirely C++/OpenGL with platform specific code only as necessary.

Well, I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next Humble Bundle, then. :-)

Could you elaborate on your use of analytics: how did you handle pre-release
testing and what were you most surprised to learn from the data?

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kenjackson
Could you explain, "Despite being an iOS game 95% of development was done on
PC."? Don't you need to do iOS development on a Mac?

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forrestthewoods
Sure. Right now our custom tech supports Windows, OS X, Linux, and iOS. I'm
most comfortable in windows so that was my personal preference. That plus the
Visual Studio debugger kicks the bajeezus out of Xcode for C++.

Some features could only be worked on through OS X. Gamecenter leaderboards,
in app purchases, analytics, and some UI bits. Some of those don't even work
in the simulator and require an actual device.

The windows build was missing a handful of features but none of them matter
for development. No full screen, no settings, hard coded resolution config,
incomplete UI, etc.

~~~
kayoone
In the screenshot below it looks like you used SublimeText instead of Visual
Studio. Does it have benefits for CPP dev ?

[https://outland-live.s3-us-
west-2.amazonaws.com/media/downlo...](https://outland-live.s3-us-
west-2.amazonaws.com/media/downloads/30weeksOfOutland.jpg)

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seivan
Very cool, again thanks for sharing. I actually liked the credits snippet as
well, mostly because I didn't see anyone who didn't belong there. Software
Engineer, art, effects, animation and sound. Not sure what VO is.

But seems like you guys run a lean operation - and I love that. That's what
most teams should be.

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seattlematt
VO is voice over (the announcer). Uber Entertainment definitely runs a lean
operation, with everyone wearing multiple hats. In fact, the person
responsible for VO in the game happens to double as our office manager. You
can check out some of the other stuff we do at <http://www.uberent.com/>

~~~
seivan
That voice over was AMAZING - and as such is a skillset of it's own. I respect
that.

I happy you guys don't got "game designers" who happen to be idea guys in
disguise.

Keep it up, I'll pay for your stuff just because of that. The quality is just
a bonus.

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freefrag
Great job on the game, out of curiosity why did it take 3 submissions before
it finally went on the app store?

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ga0bi
From reddit's r/gamedev post:

"We missed a checkbox one time for IAP and a restore purchases button the
second time."

Link:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/19vli0/30_weeks_of_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/19vli0/30_weeks_of_game_development/c8s3mza)

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kaoD
I learn something from this: to make your character look like it's standing
(instead of floating) you just need to tilt the floor a bit :P

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Kiro
Where did you see that?

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kaoD
Compare 0:36 and 1:30.

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NateLipscomb
Congrats, thanks for sharing this.

As a game dev myself, I'd definitely love to hear more about the custom engine
you used and why you chose it over the other options on the market (like
Unity, which you mentioned).

~~~
forrestthewoods
It's the same engine as our much larger game, Planetary Annihilation.
<http://www.uberent.com/pa/> PA needs it's own engine as no off the shelf
option is sufficient for it's needs.

Outland Games is a _much_ simpler game, but the PA engine is modular enough
that we could scale down to mobile. The upside is that a lot of the work for
Outland Games will carry forward with the engine and help future projects
(including PA).

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SkittlesNTwix
I'm on the PA Kickstarter. Looking forward to playing the finished product!

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Draiken
Aren't we all? :D

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raverbashing
Congratulation on this writeup (and video), this is amazing

Care to share how the team was built etc? Who's on contract, who's on the
business, how did you get people to wear multiple hats?

I would have gone the way of building it on the PC and later porting it to iOS
(or whatever you want) probably using SDL, oh well =)

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readme
Looks awesome.

Curious if you are the developer? If so, did you pay your help (graphics,
sound, etc) or were they volunteers?

If so, how much should one budget to hire people for that end?

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deevus
Looks great. I'd love to give it a go but I don't own an iDevice. Are there
plans to release to other platforms such as Android?

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icefox
Just curious, when you started what was the original pitch that you had for
what the game would be?

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dsirijus
Out of interest - did you feel the sale bump after publishing the blog post
and sharing it around?

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biot
Hm... it wouldn't let me purchase on my iPad 1: says it requires a camera. :(

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Zr40
That's probably done to prevent iPad 1 owners from purchasing the game.
Besides requiring iOS 6.0, requiring a camera is currently the only way to
exclude the first-generation iPad.

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jasonlotito
How many people worked on this? What roles did they play?

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bvdbijl
You can see who worked on it on the bottom of this image: [https://outland-
live.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/media/downlo...](https://outland-live.s3-us-
west-2.amazonaws.com/media/downloads/30weeksOfOutland.jpg)

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sidcool
Nice work. Good game. Solid graphics.

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chromejs10
very cool. thanks for sharing

