Posted December 6th, 2009 by micah
Diary of a new iPhone game
Part 1 – (you’re reading it)
Part 2 – Adventures in Game Engines
Part 3 – The story, so far…
I’m starting on a new iPhone game, and this time I’m going to try something different. I’ll be writing regular updates about how development is going, sharing all my ideas and decisions along the way, probably even sharing snippets of source code, and overall keep you informed about the whole development process. Hopefully this will end up being useful to budding game developers trying to figure out how it’s done, and to myself, since I’m still trying to figure out how it’s done.
The working title of my new game is A Princess Tale. Crystal and I have been talking about making a game that goes against the norms in gaming for some time, in which you play as a princess whose goal is to go off and rescue a dragon. Lately I’ve been interested in retro games for the iPhone also (although I found the gameplay and plot slightly too simplistic, I was overwhelmed with nostalgia after playing RPG Quest: Minimae, and I sat there for a solid 2 hours and beat the whole game). I’ve been toying with the idea of making an RPG myself, but I decided that I would prefer to make more of a fantasy action game instead, in the same grain as the Legend of Zelda for NES. Although I’m tempted to stick to just a couple colors and make everything low-res and blocky, I’m not going to. But so far I am thinking everything will be pixel art, and all the music and sound effects will be 8-bit. I’m also a fan of the MMO Kingdom of Loathing and of Monty Python, and I think I’m going to try to go slightly in that direction in regards to humor. So that’s the premise of A Princess Tale: an old-school Zelda-like action fantasy game that’s funny and that’s about a princess who has to go save a dragon. This is the most ambitious game project I’ve started yet, but I’m confident I’ll keep with it and end up with an awesome product.
Since the original idea for the game, I’ve developed the plot some more, which I’ll be covering in greater detail later (which I suppose will include sploilers for the game, once it’s actually released, so read with caution). Here’s a brief summary: The game starts out with your father, the King, ordering a witch burning. It’s very horrible, and when you protest the King doesn’t take you seriously because you’re a woman. So you decide then and there to overthrow the Kingdom and restore justice to the land. I’m still working out the details of the story (and I’ll surely go into much greater detail later on), but you discover that the King is keeping a dragon prisoner and that surely by freeing him he will aid you in taking down the King. Along the way you’ll need to bribe a troll guarding a bridge with a cell phone (he’s lonely guarding the bridge, and wants to send text messages to his girlfriend), and befriend a covenant of witches to help you break an enchantment that’s holding the dragon in bonds.
That’s it for now. In the next post I’ll talk about the game engine and level editor, and how I intend to make them, and also my brief adventure with GameSalad. I’ll also scan in some game design notes showing off plot ideas, level editor programming notes, and maps.
