Chimps Ahoy! Postmortem

Posted on November 12th, 2008 by Brian Kirkness
Postmortems : iPhone, OpenGL, SDK

BEYOND THE UNKNOWN

Venturing into the unknown can often be a daunting task, and Chimps Ahoy! had all the right ingredients to be very scary. Being Griptonite’s first foray into mobile games; having a short development cycle; and working on an unknown platform all combined to slightly intimidate us as a team. “Slightly” I said! However overwhelming the task might have seemed though, the excitement of being a launch title on such a unique platform instilled a thrill of adventure into the project, causing us to jump at the chance to develop a game for the iPhone.

Like the majority of developers trying to hit the launch window for the iPhone, we here at Griptonite had very little time to get our act together (only 3 months). The first thing we had to do was decide on the direction for our game design. We ended up using the core mechanics of a game our Technical Director presented. With core game play in place we turned to deciding how to present the game. Pirates? Ninjas? Monkeys? Yes please! With a design that incorporated as many internet clichés as humorously possible, we began moving forward with development.

Fortunately, Griptonite has a very robust in-house game engine that we use when developing our DS titles. The trick was figuring out what we needed and how many libraries could be directly ported to the iPhone.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Once we were granted access by Apple to develop on the hardware we were able to get up to speed very quickly. This is in big part due to the OpenGL Emulator from Imagination Technologies. While we were waiting for our Developer status to be approved this allowed us to start work on the PC. Inevitably we all got Mac Minis.

We also had an excellent composer. All too often music is considered to be an after thought in games. However, when it’s done well, it is an excellent compliment to a title and can really accentuate the feel of the game. Chimps Ahoy!‘s music ties right into the fun, upbeat art style of the game. This was a definite “right,” as far as matching the comical, richly-colored style reminiscent of the slick commercial and animation art of the 1950s to mid-1960s.

Overall, I have to say it was the team camaraderie that really saw this project through. Everyone willingly pitched in with design ideas, tuning feedback, and late nights (hooray pizza!). Chimps Ahoy! gave us a chance to flex our creative muscles in a way that we don’t always get to when working on licensed titles. I should note here that our “publisher” (our Executive Vice President of Strategic Projects, Doug Hare) took a very big interest in the title. He did a lot of market research, played the game almost as much as QA, and we had some great design discussions. It was VERY much a team effort on both the client and developer side that we don’t always get to experience with some of our clients. I feel very strongly that the game benefited greatly from that interaction.

WHAT WENT WRONG

Developing on a new platform is always tricky, and the iPhone is no exception. Due to the newness of the device, as well as the lack of documentation from Apple, we ran into all the usual things you would expect on a new platform and then some.

While a lot of issues were beyond our control, it’s worth noting that these unpredictable factors should always be taken into consideration when scheduling. For us, this was made evident by our oversight to schedule buffer time for working on an unknown platform and with an unexplored Software Development Kit. Instead, we had based our schedule on our tried-and-true DS production timelines.

At the outset of the project it took almost a month for us to start developing on an actual iPod Touch. This was, apparently, due to an overwhelming demand for licenses. This issue prevented us from being on target early in the project.

Another factor that was unpredictable was the frequency of SDK updates. Initially released at irregular intervals with very little documentation, it took us a couple revisions before we realized that we needed to schedule 1-3 days for fixing everything the updates would break. Near the end of the development process, updates appeared on a more regular two week cycle. Again, this is just the kind of thing that happens on a new platform, but it wasn’t initially a part of the schedule.

This is not to say that we didn’t make mistakes as well. We had a very hard time getting our 2D art working properly in a 3D environment. When we have done this in the past on the DS we have used proprietary tools, but these wouldn’t work on the iPhone. We instead had to figure out Imagination Technologies Power SDK. Lastly, while Macs are great machines, most of us had never touched one — nonetheless developed on one before — and becoming accustomed to new tool chains and pipelines hindered our progress all too often.

SUMMARY

This was a new and fun experience for the team on many levels. The challenges were plentiful and the excitement of being a launch title on a brand new platform really helped keep things moving full steam ahead. We learned a lot about designing, developing, and even publishing a smaller scale game than we are used to. Since Chimps Ahoy! launched we’ve begun work on a couple more titles and I am pleased to announce things have been going much smoother!