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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
If you are programming directly in objective-c then it will likely require using a mac.
iOS games are often done in things like Unity where you can cross compile to iOS and Android. For that you can get away with using a PC.
their game engine is probably C++. As they dont need to use Apples SDK for app specific stuff like UI elements, they also dont need to use objective-c.
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.
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/
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).
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).
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.
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.