The story of Panda and iOS

Idea

The idea of ​​creating a game for us and a colleague came at the end of 2009. Not even an idea, but a desire to create a game for a mobile platform. That is to say try to create a finished product and sell it.
Here we must make a reservation that we are not engaged in coding directly due to the debt of current work, although it is related to IT. The programming experience was present, in particular, Java and ActionScript, which was very useful later, but we didn’t have to cross with Objective-C earlier. Nevertheless, the development platform was chosen iPhone OS (then still iPhone OS). We already had iPhones and it would be strange to buy a device, for example, on Android, in order to write an application for it.
I remember genre we were predisposed to “slasher”. However, wanting to make the game to the maximum on their own, without involving third parties, they appreciated that it would be more realistic to dwell on the less dynamic genre of puzzles. In the process of searching for ideas, “sea battle”, “points”, “gallows” and other options were recruited, often in practice already implemented and published in the App Store. But now it is especially interesting to read in the “Dev Story” section about many ideas that we considered at that stage.
Returning to our creativity, at some point we stopped at the following concept:

• A charismatic vacuum cleaner moves across the floor of the room, cleaning it from debris / dust;
• Different parts of the floor are “stained” with different intensity;
• On the floor there are obstacles in the form of household items, they need to go around;
• The amount of movement at the level is limited;
• The goal of the game is to build the optimal path and collect as much garbage as possible for the smallest number of movements and, as a result, earn the maximum number of points.

With this formulation of the problem, we started to work on a prototype. Almost immediately, our artist Julia Maximova put forward an idea with the adventures of a panda.
The first draft sprites were amazing. The image of the main character, for example, resembled a skull. It, of course, redrawn and added animation. And then many other initial settings gradually changed. The idea made another round, completely transformed and the game was called “Panda Game”.


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Development

Attended by: Cocos2d, Xcode from 3rd to 4th, SVN, old free Zwoptex for collecting textures of sprites and Adobe products when creating graphics.



Originally in the prototype, 5 levels were statically coded, they contained all possible game elements and allowed to test their display, interaction with the character and the player's user interface. While the code was being debugged and refined, a level designer was written in parallel. It was an ActionScript development with the ability to save the edited level to an XML file that was imported into the project in xcode.



The editing of the levels themselves took considerable time: the level had to be created so that it was of interest and could be passed. The difficulty here was that with independent testing by outsiders, it could turn out that the level could have been completed in a much simpler way than planned and all interest was immediately lost.
Intermediate test versions were distributed among friends, colleagues and other sympathizers. This allowed us to get initial reviews and comments, as well as rank the levels of complexity and interestingness. We tried to build the game in such a way that the player was interested in continuing to play further.



Some of the earliest findings from beta testing:

• Add learning levels;
• Refusal to move sites simultaneously;
• Add the ability to undo the last action.

Using the simultaneous movement of sites, testers learned to push them together, which opened the way for the level to pass through an unplanned way for developers. And the need to introduce a mechanism to cancel the last action delayed the development for a long time.
Now we can’t compare the actual development time with the planned time, simply because there was no plan as such. The development was carried out in free personal time and the advancement to the final result went zigzag: the code was actively changing, then the graphic material was catching up and ahead. Sometimes the development for a long time subsided, but resumed again. Surely we can say one thing: the main skeleton of the game was written really very quickly, and the problems started later when everything seemed to be finished, and only a refinement of the details remained. The process dragged on and we confess that we could have released the game much earlier.

Graphics and plot. What comes first?

The game survived 3 generations of graphics and changed 2 icons before satisfying the inner sense of the wonderful developers. During this time, 5 different sets of game elements for different countries appeared, and then a wonderful map was born for navigating through the levels passed. Having 5 different countries creating different moods from playing in them, we began to ask ourselves questions: why does the Panda travel? and generally why not sitting at home? The answer was the screenshots of the plot. So by the middle of the development we learned the plot that was hidden in the game.

Voice acting

We did not have a person who would be with the creation of effects on you. Attempts to find such among friends or freelancers - did not develop.
In parallel with the search for a professional, we tried to solve the problem on our own. I must say that even at the initial stages in the prototype there were sound effects - like stubs in the code for later filling with sane sounds. At the testing stage, these were samples recorded from a standard microphone with the help of an exclusively speech writing apparatus and Bach's composition transcribed on an acoustic guitar as background. The last one by the way was fine, but we did not find the possibility to use it legally.
Once, when we had coffee and brandy, we walked around the apartment at midnight and recorded the sounds of the surrounding everyday objects on the directional microphone in the hope of using excerpts from the results in the game. It was a lot of fun! For example, do you know how a boiling kettle, an opening door of a sliding-door wardrobe or corn flakes of various shapes falling on a cardboard sound in the recording? Or on a plate? It was recorded about three hours of "noise". I don’t remember that something went into the release from there, but I personally realized one thing for myself: that in 99 percent of cases, a person who did not participate in recording never guesses the sound source.



We will be glad to hear your feedback, questions and comments!
Panda Game Link: itunes.apple.com/app/panda-game/id492040741