It's interesting how the core game was basically finished very early on (week twelve or so), and then the rest of it was "just" polish. So in this case, the proverbial last 20% are really 60% of the work.
Despite being an iOS game 95% of development was done on PC.
Well, I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next Humble Bundle, then. :-)
Could you elaborate on your use of analytics: how did you handle pre-release testing and what were you most surprised to learn from the data?
Some features could only be worked on through OS X. Gamecenter leaderboards, in app purchases, analytics, and some UI bits. Some of those don't even work in the simulator and require an actual device.
The windows build was missing a handful of features but none of them matter for development. No full screen, no settings, hard coded resolution config, incomplete UI, etc.
https://outland-live.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/media/downlo...
But seems like you guys run a lean operation - and I love that. That's what most teams should be.
I happy you guys don't got "game designers" who happen to be idea guys in disguise.
Keep it up, I'll pay for your stuff just because of that. The quality is just a bonus.
"We missed a checkbox one time for IAP and a restore purchases button the second time."
Link: http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/19vli0/30_weeks_of_...
As a game dev myself, I'd definitely love to hear more about the custom engine you used and why you chose it over the other options on the market (like Unity, which you mentioned).
Outland Games is a much simpler game, but the PA engine is modular enough that we could scale down to mobile. The upside is that a lot of the work for Outland Games will carry forward with the engine and help future projects (including PA).
Care to share how the team was built etc? Who's on contract, who's on the business, how did you get people to wear multiple hats?
I would have gone the way of building it on the PC and later porting it to iOS (or whatever you want) probably using SDL, oh well =)
Curious if you are the developer? If so, did you pay your help (graphics, sound, etc) or were they volunteers?
If so, how much should one budget to hire people for that end?
