Ok, first things first. My blogging here will be a bit unusual at first. Actually I’ve been working on my first iPhone game for about two months already. Just conceptually mostly and in my spare time, so there is not much in terms of finished code or art yet. But still, I’m going to blog about things I did, researched etc. earlier. To catch up with the current state of things. Let’s begin now.
First thing you have to know if you are going to make a game is the genre, right? I love RPGs, so I decided it’s going to be an RPG. Traditional one, with swords, spells, dungeons and lots of statistics you can dig into. Serious, but in pocket format. No cute characters with too big eyes and breasts. But how to achieve that?
At that time I was heavily impressed with an iOS game called “Infinity Blade”. It’s a 3D slasher resembling somewhat a very good PS3 title “Demon’s Souls”. I’ve never seen such a good looking game on iPhone before. My iPhone also never got so hot (literally) while playing a game. Here is a pocketgamer review if somebody is interested.
Anyway, I was aware, there is no chance I could make such impressive 3D graphics myself in reasonable time. So the first question was: “am I going 3D or 2D route?” I always thought iPhone is more suitable for 2D games. True 3D iOS titles like “Aralon HD” or “Chaos Rings” were a royal pain to play for me. Why? Mainly because of cumbersome controls (no dedicated buttons on iDevices, just touchscreen) and not very good-looking graphics. The first reason being much more important. But Infinity Blade was an exception. Graphics was amazing. But more importantly, controls were easy to use. They did not implement free movement as in most 3D titles. So no virtual joysticks, which cause, that half of the screen is obscured by your thumbs. Movement was solved much more elegant. Every 3D scene has 2-3 glowing points. You can tap one of them to go there or perhaps attack some monster or knight standing there. If you do that, game engine renders the movement scene, which is not interactive. After a few seconds you get control over your character again.
I liked this idea very much. So I decided to use it in my game, to make controls simple and elegant. This lead me to the name of the game: “Infinity Dungeon”. Which is still theoretically subject to change. But I don’t think it’s going to happen.
There are other reasons why Infinity and why Dungeon, but this will be subject of my next post.
Infinity Dungeon 