Circuloid inside out. Part I.
As you may have noticed, Circuloid is now available in App Store both for iPad and iPhone. To celebrate we will talk about our experiences and lessons learnt during the whole process of making a game. Circuloid is our company’s first game title released for iOS and, for most of our team members, a first game released ever. That fact, we suppose, allowed us to have a fresh look at the whole process.
We plan to publish series of posts created by different team members describing interesting aspects of work with Circuloid believing that our experiences can be useful for other developers willing to create or just creating their first game.
In the first part I will mostly try to describe how the game concept was born.
Gentle introduction…
…for those of you who need a few words of explanation about Circuloid :)
Circuloid is Macoscope’s tribute to a great family of arkanoid-style brick-breaker games. We took this old concept then twisted it a bit, and bent it around until we got some interesting shapes in hand. As you can guess from its name – Circuloid is basically an arkanoid game, based on a round board, but that is not all.
The origin
The original idea came to my mind with my first use of iPhone. “It would be great to have an arkanoid played with a whole device” I thought. Unfortunately, as a man whose computer addiction was born in the good old days of C64, I had a rather steady picture of all arkanoid games as one breed.
More or less static colorful bricks hit by the ball. It does not sound as an exciting game for today’s players, right? It was obvious for me that gameplay needs to be a little bit refreshed. Obvious choice – adding real physics to the game. Real physics means not only a simple application of the laws of reflection, but also of friction, elasticity, etc.
Considering the above-mentioned way of refreshing an old game concept, I was absolutely sure that this is almost impossible if you are targeting (somehow limited) mobile devices.
Things got changed when I saw a short movie of Hyperballoid2 gameplay. My mind exploded when I saw what happens when some physics are applied to this old genre. Bricks now can rotate, move, slide, explode, etc. etc. I started to rework the problem: “maybe there is a simple way to add physics…” and of course after a few hours I knew that my original assumption was wrong. There are simple frameworks ready to be used, to drive a flat 2D world even on mobile devices – Chipmunk, Box2D to name a few. That’s how we get to the first lesson – don’t assume, check and then check again!
The next “big idea” came from an observation. When you are holding your iPhone on its shorter sides and start to rotate the whole device as a kind of steering-wheel your hands are drawing small fragments of circles in the air. This observation inspired me. What if the whole game playing field will be changed from a rectangle to a circle?
The original rectangle shape was born, I believe, to properly fill the only display device of those days – a TV screen. Obviously, no one thought back then about rotating an over 100-pound TV set just to bounce a funny ball on the screen…
Changing the basic shape of a game play-field seemed to be an interesting mutation. Here we have the second lesson learnt – new devices bring the new ways of interacting with them, so keep your eyes open!
That is how Circuloid’s game concept was born. The rest of the improvements or enrichments were born “on the table” during the whole development process.
Development
We all know that for most of the time development is a rather boring process of changing pure idea into something that can be tested by other human beings. Of course in the next parts we will share with you a few fine-grained development details. For today I would rather like to share one observation about the development time.
You may think that a great gameplay makes a great game. It’s true, but only partially. Great gameplay can easily become a social meme. It will also be appreciated and maybe even awarded. Unfortunately from the developers’ perspective game is a mix of great gameplay plus lots of boring stuff: menus, intro screen, settings, hall of fame, scores serialization and storage module, mechanisms to freeze, pause and restart the whole game, etc. Most of them can be easily implemented, but it does not mean that they are zero effort tasks. So the third lesson, probably well-known to some of you: transition from the prototype game to a market ready product always takes longer than you expect.
For the scientific minds among you, here is a very rough math rule that I “invented”: time needed to finish a game is equal to the time needed to finish a prototype expressed in the next time unit in increasing order plus 50 per cent. Example: if your prototype took 4 weeks to build, your game will be ready in (4+2) months :)
That is like gravity, we may not agree that we are falling, but our disagreement will not change the reality. Gravity just has us.
That’s all for part one.
Next time Tomek will reveal the secret details of graphic design for Circuloid. Stay tuned!
Yesterday Productive! Magazine hit the App Store shelves. It was created in collaboration with 
We have just launched our first game release called Circuloid. In the game you become a white-collar worker, that always dreamed of becoming an undercover agent. One day John gets a suspicious package and gets the ball rolling, literally.
