As promised I'd use this entry to talk a bit about the upcoming iPhone title that I'm working on. A couple of months ago I was lucky enough to meet a couple of talented 3D artists with a game concept draft ready. As things turned out they were also looking for a couple of programmers to turn this concept into an actual game. Following an interview with me and a friend of mine, who actually introduced me to the artists in the first place, we received an e-mail stating that my friend and I were hired.

This project is very exciting for me for numerous reasons. First of all, it's my first real project in the software industry, and not many first year computer science students are lucky enough to be able to call themselves professional game programmers on the side. Secondly, it's pretty much my first time developing software for anything else than regular desktop computers. Making games for a device like the iPhone certainly requires some interesting considerations. Especially when it comes to performance optimization. I could write several pages about, what I've learned so far and the methods we've used.

We're using the Unity game engine and development tool for the game, and it's also an interesting experience to be working with this type of software. The Unity iPhone version makes it very easy to run and debug the application on iPhone devices, and using a high level tool like Unity in general makes many things a lot easier compared to writing your own low level software. I'll definitely talk a bit about this experience in a future entry.

As for the game concept it's a classic 2D platformer (actually we're going with orthographic 3D). You play as a young graffiti artist working his way up through the slums earning respect as your graffiti pieces become better. The interesting part of the game is of course the graffiti. First of all we've written a tag generator that takes 3-5 letters and makes a nice graffiti tag to be stamped onto walls, train cars etc. Players can then use free hand painting to fill out the piece however they like. I'd like to point out that the game is meant to encourage creativity and the use of (legal) graffiti as an art form and not vandalism.

That was a brief introduction to the game. I will most likely write some more later about some of the technical specifics of the game. During the development we've encountered a variety of very interesting tasks and problems, and I'd like to share a few experiences with the rest of you DIC'ers.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned
Sigurd