How Halfbrick Studios develops games like Fruit Ninja, Age Of Zombies and Jetpack Joyride
“This is the first draft of Fruit Ninja that was created during Halfbrick Fridays. This is literally the first image of the game, so it has historical value, ”wrote marketing director Phil Larsen in the letter. Last week, he and Halfbrick Studio technology director Richard McKinney were interviewed about how the company creates its games. Halfbrick Fridays is one of the ways the Australian company finds ideas for new games. The idea of Fruit Ninja - their main hit today - appeared during this event.
Halfbrick fridays
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The company organizes its Halfbrick Fridays five to seven times a year, during which the entire company (about 70 people) breaks up into groups of about five people and generates new ideas. The most interesting thing is that not only developers and game designers take part in these events, but all employees. The result of this process, for example, are games such as Age of Zombies (Larsen and McKinney said that the final version is very different from the prototype) and Monster Dash.
Despite the fact that the process of creating Fruit Ninja took only a few months, the team said that the ideas of some games are in the air for several years and have not yet been realized.
From idea to game
Interestingly, literally all Halfbrick games use basically one engine (almost completely written in C ++). The core team for working on the engine consists of six “hardcore programmers” who provide a stable architecture for the rest of the teams working on individual games.
One of the biggest teams at Halfbrick right now is the cloud service team, which provides technology that integrates games across platforms. For this purpose, Halfbrick uses Amazon's EC2 platform and recently switched to the NoSQL database in order to improve scalability.
This engine is designed to simplify the publication of applications for various platforms as much as possible. Many developers have difficulty porting their games to other platforms. This process can take months and cause loss of precious time.
Halfbrick Studios launches games for Windows, Xbox, PlayStation, Windows Phone, Android and iOS. All main code is written in C ++. “Many companies make the mistake of programming only in Objective C,” said McKinney. "But how is all this transferred to Android?"
So as not to rewrite the code again, Halfbrick uses C ++ and tries to rely on native languages as little as possible. Their engine provides developers with universal interfaces to abstract from the differences between platforms, and using C ++ gives teams control over performance and memory usage and fine-tuning capabilities. As well, C ++ allows game developers to use many third-party libraries.
To publish code for various native platforms, Halfbrick uses a combination of open source and proprietary tools.
Most of the Halfbrick development process takes place in Visual Studio, so the team doesn't have to constantly use Apple's Xcode. MacKinnie said Visual Studio "is the best environment for creating games with which we had to work." Halfbrick does not want their developers to learn how to work in different environments, so the system the team created allows programmers to work exclusively with Visual Studio and C ++, even if they are developing for HTML5.
The location in Brisbane gives them a wide choice of developers (the company also has small teams in Sydney, San Francisco and Spain). Brisbane has several schools for game developers, so they don’t lack new talent. Given that C ++ has long been the standard for creating games, finding developers with the necessary knowledge is not that difficult, but since the company’s work is carried out by very small groups, it is extremely selective in terms of hiring employees. “We don't want to lose all our magic and fans,” remarks Larsen. Therefore, we need employees with a very high level of training.
After expanding its product range to other platforms, Halfbrick plans to launch about five games this year. Some of these games will be spin-offs of previous hits of the company, and the rest - completely new games, but the details are still kept secret.
Halfbrick fridays
')
The company organizes its Halfbrick Fridays five to seven times a year, during which the entire company (about 70 people) breaks up into groups of about five people and generates new ideas. The most interesting thing is that not only developers and game designers take part in these events, but all employees. The result of this process, for example, are games such as Age of Zombies (Larsen and McKinney said that the final version is very different from the prototype) and Monster Dash.
Despite the fact that the process of creating Fruit Ninja took only a few months, the team said that the ideas of some games are in the air for several years and have not yet been realized.
From idea to game
Interestingly, literally all Halfbrick games use basically one engine (almost completely written in C ++). The core team for working on the engine consists of six “hardcore programmers” who provide a stable architecture for the rest of the teams working on individual games.
One of the biggest teams at Halfbrick right now is the cloud service team, which provides technology that integrates games across platforms. For this purpose, Halfbrick uses Amazon's EC2 platform and recently switched to the NoSQL database in order to improve scalability.
This engine is designed to simplify the publication of applications for various platforms as much as possible. Many developers have difficulty porting their games to other platforms. This process can take months and cause loss of precious time.
Halfbrick Studios launches games for Windows, Xbox, PlayStation, Windows Phone, Android and iOS. All main code is written in C ++. “Many companies make the mistake of programming only in Objective C,” said McKinney. "But how is all this transferred to Android?"
So as not to rewrite the code again, Halfbrick uses C ++ and tries to rely on native languages as little as possible. Their engine provides developers with universal interfaces to abstract from the differences between platforms, and using C ++ gives teams control over performance and memory usage and fine-tuning capabilities. As well, C ++ allows game developers to use many third-party libraries.
To publish code for various native platforms, Halfbrick uses a combination of open source and proprietary tools.
Most of the Halfbrick development process takes place in Visual Studio, so the team doesn't have to constantly use Apple's Xcode. MacKinnie said Visual Studio "is the best environment for creating games with which we had to work." Halfbrick does not want their developers to learn how to work in different environments, so the system the team created allows programmers to work exclusively with Visual Studio and C ++, even if they are developing for HTML5.
The location in Brisbane gives them a wide choice of developers (the company also has small teams in Sydney, San Francisco and Spain). Brisbane has several schools for game developers, so they don’t lack new talent. Given that C ++ has long been the standard for creating games, finding developers with the necessary knowledge is not that difficult, but since the company’s work is carried out by very small groups, it is extremely selective in terms of hiring employees. “We don't want to lose all our magic and fans,” remarks Larsen. Therefore, we need employees with a very high level of training.
After expanding its product range to other platforms, Halfbrick plans to launch about five games this year. Some of these games will be spin-offs of previous hits of the company, and the rest - completely new games, but the details are still kept secret.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/171617/
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