Stage 1 out of 3

Since the first days of September two professional artists, Nikolaos Larin (Graphics/SFX) and Vicky Fysika (Music) joined the team along with three more expert advisors namely Michael Fragos (Game Design), Dimitris Fragkos (Graphics) and Christos Arapis (Promotion and Video production). The following months since the last post were somehow bussy to catch-up the deadlines, so, this post took a little more to be written.

Regarding the game, it is near the beta version release nowadays and ready to be given to beta testers ready to play it in various Apple's devices from iPhone(1) to iPhone 4 and iPod touch. The iPad version of the game will follow shortly the other devices submission to Apple's AppStore.

Among other time consuming activities, the team participated in the 3rd Hellenic Game Developers Conference (HGDC), 9-10 October during the Athens Digital Week event in Athens, Greece. The majority of the team members not only were among the organisation commitee but gave individual speeched during the two days of the HGDC. Also, Rotten Fish Games collectively made a presentation of the indie-business model that follows for building a game from concept to market the second day of the Conference.

So, being in a productive rush, the last two months were spent creating the necessary artwork like ships, bad-asses, mini-bosses, bosses, weapons, special effects, backgrounds, logos, UI, sound effects, music scores and whatever else is needed for this game. The design took a decisive turn early in September but the overall concept remained intact: the game still introduces two kind of ships but instead of the all-time classic shoot'em up mode with lasers, beams and plasma charges the main mode introduces the asteroid-management mechanics gameplay in the single player option.

Nevertheless, the late introduction of the artists in the team, caused some code implementation changes to support unexpected artwork challenges but the work pipeline suffered the least. The ideas introduced especially for the graphics lead to overall improvements of the game but especially to the frame rate in older devices that suffered low fps some times. This result supports greatly the necessity to work in a team of professionals that exchange common field knowledge. However, we went our tools usage a step further introducing Dropbox in our collection.

More about the game will be reveiled during the beta phase starting in a few days and the developers' diaries will follow shortly to offer an idea of the challenges met during the development of the game. In between, the Rotten Fish Games presentation for the 3rd HGDC will be explained as well in more details in the team's official site.

Georgios Chiotis