getluky.net

As you’ve probably heard, my first game for the iPhone and iPod Touch made it to the App Store yesterday – it’s called Skybox, and you can get it here. I wanted to make a quick blog post and talk about the multiple inspirations for the game’s design.

One of the funniest things my family’s ever seen on the Internet was this video of a Japanese game show titled “Human Tetris”. The contestants are forced to try and fit through ridiculous cutouts on a wall that approaches them. Although it’s partly hilarious because the cutouts are so absurd, it’s fun to throw a wall at someone and see how they manage to fit inside of a hole.

More recently, the indie game Aaaaa! managed to make me stick my tongue out and feel like Air Jordan when I was playing. It’s a futuristic base-jumping game with digital graphics and a super fun sensation of falling and always pulling out of danger at the last possible minute.

After being exposed to these two ideas, my studio mate, Kazu Kibuishi, had been telling me about how fun it would be to have a puzzle game where you’re just a geometric polygon trying to fit through a wall. I decided to try and combine all of my favorite mechanics from these inspirations into a simple prototype with a falling brick. It was so much fun that I decided to turn it into a quick and easy to play complete game. Here’s a video so you can see how it turned out:

I definitely still have much to learn in the world of game development, but I think I hit all the essentials with this one. Try it out, I think you’ll enjoy it!

Tech

Holy cow, and I thought four days was short! My new game, Skybox, was submitted to Apple on January 18th in the afternoon, and was approved this morning, January 21st. It was already marked as “In Review” on the 19th, so that makes the review process as short as… two or three days now?

It’s crazy to think that only two and a half weeks ago, I started working on a game, and today it’s now available on the App Store. The approval backlog was once so bad that I think you might have submitted a game and waited just about as long as that. It really goes to show that the improvements Apple has made in their App Store process (in less than a year of public existence) were not just limited to the holidays. It’s not to say that there is no more controversy – I think people are still getting upset at the fact that there’s a gatekeeper between them and the customer, but with an improvement in turnaround, I think it probably goes a long way towards soothing the relationship between the platform and developers.

Tech