One of the greatest things about App Store games is that they’ve broken the seemingly relentless escalation of costs for developers and price-increases for end users. In a sense, many of the games on the store return us to the halcyon days of 8-bit games—playable, quickfire efforts that innovated and packed in plenty of personality.
Over at creature24.com, three guys are about to take this idea to the extreme, taking a skeleton idea for an iPhone game through to App Store submission—all in just 24 hours. Progress will be shown live on the website on March 6, starting at 9:00am EST, and the trio of devs say comments from visitors might even be integrated into the game. I caught up with one of the three crazy game creators, Binary Hammer‘s Bob Koon, to find out more.
Craig Grannell: So, what is it you’re going to do?
Bob Koon: The short version is that we’re going to implement a full, polished iDevice game from just a concept all the way through to App Store submission in just 24 hours. The format of the event is a game diary. Throughout the event, we will be posting on the game development disciplines (programming, art, audio, and so on) so we’ll interject algorithms, tips, ‘pseudocode’, etc., in amongst all the sketches, screenshots, prototype videos and everything else.
Why are you doing this?
We only realized right before making the announcement that making a game in ‘X’ hours/days wasn’t a new idea. We did know about Project72 and the great job those guys did. When we came up with the idea for ours however, we wanted to involve both the gaming- and game-development communities. We thought it would be interesting for game players to follow how a game is put together so we deliberately put some planning and organization into it instead of being an off-the-cuff kind of thing.
We have given people further incentives to watch the progress by putting their name in the game if they follow us on Twitter. As we post screenshots and whatnot, we will be asking for user input on what icon looks better than the other, giving us ideas for other gameplay elements and assets. Ultimately, we want to give the followers a vested interest in the game by giving them as many personal ties to it as possible.
Perhaps the biggest incentive, and one aspect of our project that we believe makes it unique, is that we have arranged some software giveaways. We were planning simply to mention the software we use (and help us make a game so quickly), but we took that idea further by giving people a chance to win a copy of that software so they can start making their own games. We asked the creators of that software if they were willing to donate a license and they thought we had a great idea.
What are you hoping to achieve?
We wanted to try something different for this project that was radically different than our previous projects for the iDevice. Those were the usual “here is the game we created, we hope you like it”. With Creature24, we wanted to give the community a reason to really care about the game. If they have a personal link to the game, they would be more open to downloading it to show their friends and family that their name is in it. If they make a suggestion for a gameplay element, they would be able to point to that and say, “I thought of that, and they put it in the game!” We think game players would get a real kick out of doing that.
What can Cult of Mac’s readers do to help?
All we’re asking is for everyone to become involved in the process. We’re trying to foster a kind of party-like atmosphere during the event. We’ll have a streaming webcam pointed at the artist the entire time and we’re inviting anyone to post comments and engage in discussion about game design, programming, anything. We want people to talk to each-other, not just us.
If you’ve ever thought about what goes into creating a game, or would like to make suggestions about certain aspects of the game’s design that could actually make it into the game, follow the project! You might walk away with some new software for your trouble!
So, Cult of Mac readers, put the date in your diary: Creature24 begins at creature24.com on March 6 from 9:00am EST.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2afqdKX3Dg
