Hello friends! Jess here with an update on two new modes for Propaganda Lander: Remix: Survival and Easy Mode.

Remix: Survival is a sensory assault of epic proportions. Players will attempt to survive as long as possible while we throw every nasty enemy known in Rickster’s Universe at them. In order to create this new mode, Tommy has had to re-haul our level editor to offer even more customization. We can now control waves of different enemy types through timing, random amperage ranges and frequency. Therefore, I’ve spent the last couple of days tweaking and testing to create an hyperactive experience. The types of issues I’ve run into mainly deal with offering an experience that has peaks and valleys instead of an experience that amps up only to plateau. What we’ve decided is to offer a sort of three steps forward, one step back mechanic that allows the player to feel like they’ve accomplished a great feat for surviving a particularly hard wave and to facilitate an innate feeling of tension and drama. Also, one other issue I’ve had to deal with is beating Tommy’s high score, but that’s more of a personal policy. The last bits that we have to deal with is optimization for all devices and implementing the soundtrack.

For all you folks that find the Lander to be a little too punishing, we’ve started on an Easy Mode. Easy Mode is exactly what it sounds like, fewer enemies, more power-ups, and less damage make it easier for the casual player to really enjoy Propaganda Lander. I’d have to say that the most difficult part of creating Easy Mode has been striking a balance between making things easier but still retain the challenge. I tend to make levels pretty difficult, look at hardcore mode for example, and it’s been a practice in self-control to really loosen things up a little. We still need to do some testing before we release Easy Mode but I think it’s totally worth it to invite casual gamers into the fold.

We made our Propaganda Lander presentation at the IGDA NYC Demo Night on March 29th. Jess and I had a great time doing it and thoroughly enjoyed the conversations we had with other developers afterwards. So, for anyone who missed it or fell asleep during our presentation–I’m sure at least parts were boring–we are going to recap it here. In fact, we might offer a little more information than we were able to present in 15 minutes.

We kicked off the presentation with this trailer and then went into a little Propaganda Lander history.

Propaganda Lander’s Origins

We had initially wanted to make Propaganda Lander a simple Facebook game in Flash. It was based on Lunar Lander and Defender. We were trying to make a classic arcade-style game. We had spent a little over a month working on the Flash title and basically had completed the project when the question of monetization hit us. We had no idea how we were going to make any money from this game.

We tried the ad model with MochiAds on another game we had on Facebook and that was a bust. So we needed a new direction.

Why iPhone?

We feel that App Store is a great avenue for independent titles. There is a large audience of over 40 million. The fee to be an App developer is low. Apple’s percentage on each sale is also low. The App Store is an easy way for users to find and buy Apps. All of these things make it attractive for any company to jump in.

However, with all these great things, there were some drawbacks. We knew nothing about iPhone development since we were predominantly a company that made Flash games. We had little experience with the iPhone’s touch screen and accelerometer. Features like these make the iPhone unique, so we really wanted to utilize the hardware.

Rebooting

We couldn’t just port our free Flash game onto the iPhone. If we were going to ask customers to shell out money for our product, we had to make the experience worthwhile. This meant we had to create more content with  story, better levels, and a conclusive end. This added a bunch of tasks including scripting movies and securing voice talent.

All these things impacted our development cycle. Our team isn’t very big so we had to balance between client work and our own work. This made our development cycle for Propaganda Lander last a whole year–at least.

We also had to learn all the quirks of the iPhone as we went along.

Game Size Issues

One of the issues that I found most important was the game size. I have a background in marketing–even though I am the lead programmer–and we were not going to release a product that didn’t go through some basic marketing checks. Not on my watch.

Since only 7% of iPhone users use iTunes to download new apps, it would have been a gross oversight to release a game above the AT&T 3G download limit. Being an iPhone user myself, I know that if I can’t get what I want on the device when I want it, I’m probably not going to remember to try it on my computer later. Especially not for a game I’ve never heard of by a company I’ve never heard of.

The main features that took up lots of space were the movies, sound effects, and music. We solved those issues with compression but, finding the right compression tool was a constant hurdle.

Luckily, AT&T doubled their 3G download limit from 10MB to 20MB not too long ago, giving us some leeway. We still had to compress but, it the process no longer required Jedi mind tricks to accomplish our size goal.

For the movies, we tried a ton of codecs, but not all codecs worked across the board on all models of iPhones and iPod Touches. We eventually settled on the H.264 codec to produce .mp4 files because it had the best quality to file size ratio.

On the sound front, we tried the default iPhone sound player at first and it worked okay in tests. In actual game play, the frame rate would fall through the floor. We then tried OpenAL with the cocos2d sound engine and that worked great except the file types required large file sizes for varied music.

In the end, we settled on FMOD which let us play MOD files. MOD files allowed for a variety of music at small file sizes. FMOD also uses OpenAL so performance was not impacted.

Performance Issues

Performance is always an issue in games. You can’t play a game that isn’t running at or close to 30 frames per second.

Since Apple releases a new iPhone every year and a bunch of iPod Touches, this creates a disparity in the hardware. The newer devices are more powerful than older models.  This meant that things we could get away with on the iPhone 3G S would not work on the first generation iPhone.

In order to solve this problem, we simply developed for the weakest device. The idea sounds elementary but, the execution was complex. We utilized as many tricks as we knew to have the game perform on every iPhone device.

We optimized our engine by using texture atlases. We halved our math calculations by using 3×3 matrices instead of the traditional 4×4. We reduced the use of STL in the engine and the game–the iPhone’s STL is not optimized for the iPhone, oddly enough.

For our use of the accelerometer, we only check it 15 times a second opposed to 30. We can probably get away with checking it even less. There is no noticeable difference in how the game feels. We also compiled our game for thumb instead of ARM. Different cases will require a different compile setting but, you can always try one or the other see which one works best.

We recommend iPhone Games Projects for a lot of other great ideas for code optimization and tips/tricks from other veterans who have been there and done that.

Flying Issues

The original flying mechanic in Propaganda Lander was two buttons on either side of the screen. Only a few select were able to fly the space ship with this system.  Issues ranged from discomfort in holding the device to disagreement whether left thrust made the lander fly left or right.

We decided to go with the accelerometer because it felt more natural and utilized the hardware. We then decided to nix the buttons and make the entire screen one thrust button.  Effectively, we solved the discomfort issue and opened up the screen real estate for more interesting art assets.

In order to get the accelerometer controls right, we came up with an idea, coded it up, and tested it. Most of our attempts sucked but, we kept persisting until we came up with a mechanic that felt right. No real genius there, just hard headed determination.

Level Issues

Once we had a flying mechanic that virtually anyone would pick up and grasp within a few minutes, we had to create some interesting levels. Propaganda Lander has 20 levels across 5 planets with an epic boss battle to conclude.

We wanted to have sufficient time for the player to get used to flying and gradually introduce new challenges to foster development of flight skills.  Frequently, testers would slide or flick the lander, instead of using thrust and accelerometer.  This posed a real challenge in first encounters with the game.

At first, we had one type of enemy and one type of ship.  We wanted every planet to add new challenges and obstacles that make it a unique enrironment. These challenges require the player to continuously adapt their flying, keeping the levels interesting instead of repetitive.

On the development side, we created a level editor that allowed anyone to make and tweak levels. This freed up the programmer to focus on more pressing issues. The level designer could tweak to her heart’s desire and then test it in the game without requiring any assistance from the programmer.

We made the level editor in Flash and then wrapped in using Zinc so that it was usable on the PC and the Mac.  The level editor definitely saved an enormous amount of time.

Marketing Process

We don’t have a dedicated marketing staff or department–that would all be me. We also have a budget of $0–or very close to it. No television or print ads for us. However, we did use as much relevant social media as we could.

Our site revolves around a blog–we use WordPress. This helps us look active. Even if we only update once a month while we are busy developing, it’s still better than not updating for 6 months at a time. Blogs make updating the site much easier and allows anyone to do it.

What really saved us time were videos. We captured game play video during development as a means of open documentation to share with the world. We recorded these videos, uploaded them to YouTube, and made a blog post. Easy. We didn’t have to sit in the office at the end of the day and figure out what to write.

We also used Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. Facebook Connect is used in the game for achievements and high scores. This helps with word of mouth. Flickr is used similarly to YouTube except we store screenshots instead of movies. We use Twitter as a means of communication with current fans, new fans, and potential fans.

Social media is incredibly prevalent, powerful, and cheap that it would be silly not to use it for what we do. We still plan to do some more traditional things like reaching out to the media and throwing a launch party–stay tuned for updates on that. I want to promise free booze so, if you like booze, stay tuned!

Here to Help

Now, I hope that the things we talked about at the NYC Demo Night was useful to the audience and useful to anyone reading this. I can’t speak for anyone else at SMASHWORX but, I am willing to provide any help I can if you are looking for it. If I can’t directly answer a question, I’ll point you to someone who can or some place that might have the answer. All you need to do is email me. You can find my email in the About Us page.

We will make an announcement when we submit Propaganda Lander to the App Store. We are just waiting for a few more things, we are 98% done! Follow us on your social network of choice. We would love to keep in touch!