Unity 3D and iOS Development
Posts tagged iphone
Sparky the Road Clown – Evolution of an Idea
Mar 17th
When I tell people I’m making a game about running over clowns, I invariably get the “wow, how on earth did you come up with that idea??” look and/or question. This article will trace the evolution of that idea, the gameplay and the graphics from a silly name to a finished game.
Just a name
The name Sparky the Road Clown is actually a name I’d had in my head for years. When somebody would cut me off in traffic or something like that, I’d say something like, “Hey, Sparky- nice driving!” or “Watch it, Sparky!” and I imagine a lot of other people say similar things. Over time, I associated Sparky and road craziness and I came up with the name Sparky the Road Clown and even came up with a little backstory: he used to be Sparky the Rodeo Clown but had since gone off the deep end and became Sparky the Road Clown. This name (and the concept of rodeo clown to road clown) stuck in my head for several years before iPhones were even around.
Running over clowns? There’s about to be an app for that
Jul 7th
It’s July, and we’re only days way from launching our new game, Sparky the Road Clown on Facebook and iPhone. We’ve already done a “soft launch” on Facebook, which means we’re letting a few people play the beta and we’re opening that up to more and more people as we add in and finish out more things. We’ll be opening it up to the world and sending the app off to Apple for approval within the next 2 weeks.
It’s great to see people who haven’t seen or played the game yet figuring out the key to knocking Sparky into the open railroad car at the end of the street, or better yet, knocking him way over the trains off the edge of the world (oops, gotta fix that). I’m getting some really good feedback from gamers and non-gamers alike. I can’t wait for everyone to see and play Sparky, but the world will have to wait a little bit longer. While I can’t wait for absolute perfection, I do want to wait for the right balance of quality and timeliness.
Here are a couple of new screenshots — the first is our excellent ngame loading screen (as usual, done by the talented Chris Magee) and the second is a screenshot showing off the new train cars, sky/background and Sparky taking one right in the face.
Unity3D + dimeRocker = iPhone + Facebook
Jun 25th
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m using Unity3D as my development environment, and I’m planning to deploy to iPhone and Facebook. I’m using Unity3D on my PC to create the application that I’m then moving that every so often (one way) to Unity iPhone on the Mac. While this isn’t an optimal workflow, it’s still not bad at all if you’re planning to deploy to a platform besides iPhone (like say, Facebook). In a few months (weeks?), Unity 3.0 will be coming out and it will have a single, unified development environment and I imagine that what I’m doing now will be much easier, but when I started development on this project in the fall, that wasn’t an option. I did realize pretty early on in the process that I wanted to deploy out to Facebook and that it wouldn’t be that much more trouble (and I was right, thankfully). In March, at the GDC (Game Developers Conference), dimeRocker began making themselves known to the world. It sounded like a perfect match for me — it works with Unity, and they provide a series of addons to integrate your Unity3D game to Facebook.
Facebook version is free, iPhone version is $1.99
Jun 18th
Sparky the Road Clown was going to be an iPhone game from the beginning, and part of my marketing plan was to buy some ads on Facebook. The more I learned and worked with Unity3D, though, the more I realized that it wouldn’t be that much more difficult to create a Facebook version if I planned it that way from the beginning — so that became the plan. While I don’t think charging people just to play the game on Facebook would work, charging for extra content within the game on Facebook is not at all uncommon (see: Zynga) and that’s the model we’re going to follow, but only to a degree.
The game will be finalized on Monday, June 28th, and sent off to Apple and launched on Facebook at the time. It will be $1.99 on the iPhone, but it will be free on Facebook. Some people have questioned the logic behind this, but I’ve spent some time thinking about it, and I think I’ve got a reasonable model in mind.
As I talked to people about my pricing model, people had questions like:
- So why $1.99 on iPhone and free on Facebook?
- Free on Facebook?? How is that fair to iPhone users who pay for it?
- Will they be exactly the same? Isn’t the free version going to hurt the sales of the paid version?
Clowns, and hammers, and cars! Oh, my!
May 28th
The great guys over at Unity recently posted a Car Tutorial, complete with racetrack and lots of options to tweak. I haven’t been happy with the physics of our car yet, so I started going through it to see how they did what they did… I got a bit sidetracked. I woke up yesterday just before 5am and had an idea about hitting the clown with a big hammer… why not, right?
So I spent all of yesterday and most of today and got that working, as well as our car model in their racetrack scenario (using that environment as a testbed) and had Chris (our graphics guru) come up with a hammer… and here are the results. Now, instead of just driving your car straight at Sparky the Road Clown, you can choose to drive past him and try your luck at whacking him with a big hammer that’s mounted to your car instead.
World, meet Sparky the Road Clown
May 21st
After many months of development, it’s time to unveil (or should I say unleash?) what I’ve been working on with the help of several talented friends. Sparky the Road Clown is a game for iPhone and Facebook and will be released this summer. The premise? Well, Sparky the Road Clown is an ex-rodeo clown. A tough old bird that has gone a little bit cuckoo, if you will.
I mean, sure, clowns are funny when they’re making balloon animals at the party, but what about at 2am, in a dark alley?
Good thing you brought a car.
Here’s a first look at our antagonist and an early screenshot from the game…
How is your “angry, disgruntled clown” voice?
Oct 21st
What an odd thing it is to see a game vision come to life… I’m hard at work with a few friends trying to develop a 3D iPhone game in a very short period of time (specifically, in the app store for a few weeks by the time Christmas rolls around). Whether it all comes together in time remains to be seen, but we’re going to give it our best shot. I have a friend named Rick Tarrant who has been in radio for a long time and does a lot of voiceover work, and he’s been a friend and a client for years. I asked him today “How is your angry, disgruntled clown voice?” — which is a very odd question to ask another human being, but that’s beside the point — well, it turns out his angry, disgruntled clown voice is outstanding. He recorded some samples, everyone involved loved them and we’ll be using those (plus a few more) for the game as well as the teaser trailer, which should be out by the end of November.
If you need voiceover/narration work done, I cannot recommend Rick highly enough. His website that has samples of his non-angry disgruntled clown voice, can be found here http://ricktarrant.com/
My first iPhone app is complete
Oct 5th
I feel like I’ve reached a milestone. My first iPhone app is complete. It was an app for Smith & Nephew, for internal distribution on their intranet. It’s not quite as fun as being able to point to something in the AppStore and say, “I did that” but it feels good nonetheless. This app was a collaboration of myself and The Danse Multimedia (as are many things I do). I did the programming and they did the graphics and animations.
Can’t put any screenshots or other details up just yet — the product doesn’t launch until March. But I’ll get some up as soon as possible.