June MYOG Blog: Marble Blast for the iPhone!
Marble Blast is a franchise that doesn't need introduction on this site. Ever since its initial release in 2002, people have been 'marbling it up' on PC, Mac, Linux, XBLA, online and yes, even Net Jet. Its simple gameplay (you are essentially a round sphere that can roll and jump) combined with a variety of power-ups and maps make it accessible to both the casual and hardcore gamer alike.
Naturally, GarageGames saw a fit with their classic IP and the iPhone, but with all the work we've got going on with Torque and InstantAction, we needed to find the right partner to help us make it happen. Enter Luma Arcade. Luma has been working with us over the past year and a half on various projects, not the least of which is the much anticipated car racer, Rev. With over 40 years of game development experience on their team, not to mention a great history in graphics and design, they were a perfect fit. Their gameplay video alone should give you an idea of what I mean:
Luke Lamothe, Technical Director of Luma Arcade, talked to me about creating Marble Blast Mobile, and the iPhone opportunity (and challenges) for this beloved game. Enjoy!
How did you integrate Marble Blast gameplay with iPhone tech?
Well, it was pretty easy to decide that Marble Blast Mobile needed to be controlled with the accelerometer on the iPhone. Being able to roll the marble by tilting the device comes to mind. Unfortunately, it wasn't as easy as just saying "if the phone is tilted to the left, then roll the marble to the left." It took a heck of a lot of tweaking to get the marble feeling natural, while at the same time having to compensate for the lack of tactile feedback that a device such as the iPhone suffers from when compared to using a keyboard or a game pad.
In addition, since you are essentially moving your screen around as you control the marble, it doesn't make sense for the player to worry about lots of touch screen interactions at the same time...that is just going to get clumsy! To lessen the need for necessary touches when controlling the ball, we developed an auto-camera system that would follow the marble as it rolled around the levels with the accelerometer input. This ended up working out quite well and allows for you to play the game with only the accelerometer and single taps for jumping when necessary.
What tools did you use to create Marble Blast Mobile?
Marble Blast Mobile was built using the iTGE engine. We chose iTGE because a) we are quite familiar with TGE from the work done on some of our previous titles, and b) Marble Blast is a GarageGames property. Also, as the existing games in the Marble Blast franchise were all written in some variation of a Torque engine, we wanted to keep to a technology that would allow us to reference the source from those games when working on this title.
In addition to iTGE, we used Torque Constructor for working on the levels. Each level started out as an existing Marble Blast level. Then, using Constructor, we made appropriate changes to optimize and pretty things up where possible.
We also used 3DSMAX and the DTS exporter plug-in for all of our DTS objects. Every DTS in Marble Blast Mobile was based on the corresponding one from Marble Blast Online, but each one had to be simplified for the iPhone hardware in terms of material, poly counts, special effects, and animations.
Adobe Photoshop was used by our artists to tweak all of the game textures. They needed to be resized to resolutions better suited for the iPhone. Alpha channels needed to be created for our specular mapping. And each texture needed to be manually tweaked (with some brand new textures created as well) since Marble Blast Mobile doesn't have all of those fancy shader effects like the online version does!
All of our sound effects (and the music) were ones that previous Marble Blast games used, but we used Audacity to convert them all to be 8kHz and mono in order to reduce the download size of the game as well as to save big time on the memory used by the application when running.
What was your development process like?
We decided to first get a version of the game running on PC, as iTGE compiles and runs fine there (due to its TGE roots), using Marble Blast Gold as a starting point. Once we got there, we needed to pull in the resources and functionality from Marble Blast Online, which was built using a version of TGEA, so it wasn't too hard to get the required information back into iTGE, but it wasn't 100% straightforward either. By the time that we had a "working" version on the PC, we had obtained our developer status from Apple and were able to get the game running on iPhones for testing.
Once on the actual hardware, we had to overcome the hurdles of performance and controls. The most important task was to get the controls working properly so that we could finalize the necessary changes to the level design for the iPhone. Concurrently, we had to find ways of increasing the performance so that the game was actually playable on the device, as we were averaging less than 10 fps on 2nd generation iPod Touches (which are the "fastest" iPhone-type devices on the market), with some of the more complex levels from Marble Blast Online running under 5 fps!
Altogether we had about 10 people contribute to the project, not including the QA people, with 4 of those being on the project pretty much full time for its duration (2 programmers and 2 artists for approximately 6 months). Generally, the work between the programmers was split between non-iPhone coding (i.e. menus, gameplay, sound, etc.) and iPhone-specific coding (input controls, graphics, performance, etc.), and the artists were split between 3D art (world and object meshes) and 2D art (menus, HUD, and textures). The additional people associated on the project worked on smaller programming, art, and design contributions. All in all, it took us about 5 months of work to reach what I would have called beta status for Marble Blast Mobile.
We are always testing our own work as we go along and try to not let any bugs or issues fester around to be dealt with later on in projects. Having said that, there were quite a few issues picked up by the excellent external QA team at VMC Game Labs that handled the majority of QA testing for us. They enabled us to concentrate on making Marble Blast Mobile better by fixing issues instead of having to look for them.
If you had to do it all again, what would you do differently?
I'm not sure what we really could have changed. I think that we tackled the project about as best we could seeing as it was our first iPhone game, we were working with iTGE (which was in beta), and we had to spend nearly the first 2 months of development time without being able to test on an iPhone while we waited for our iPhone developer application to be processed and approved by Apple.
If anything, I guess I would have liked to have had the time to include more levels in the game, as well as swap out some of the levels that perhaps were not as well suited to the iPhone (both in terms of gameplay and hardware capabilities) for some others from the Marble Blast series that perhaps were. This ultimately was a side effect of having to start working on getting the levels into the game before we could properly test on the iPhone itself.
What can we expect to see next from Luma Arcade?
Well, next will probably be us finally finishing off REV for InstantAction. It was in closed beta towards the end of last year on the site, but we decided to spend some time porting it to TGEA 1.8 from TGE 1.5. We're looking to have that back in beta shortly, and we are also working on 2 other iPhone games that are due to be released in the next few months as well (one using iTGE, and the other iTGB), so keep your eyes open :)
For more stories like this, check out GarageGames' Developer Interview series.
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