Our company was named after Valve’s “cabal” process. When we were thinking about company names, we wanted it to reflect how we worked, so when we came across Valve’s description of their process, we realized we had been practicing some of those methods in our previous companies informally and really enjoyed working that way. Artists, designers, programmers, QA coming together across disciplines to implement features or to solve problems.

Since we are only a few people working remotely, we have adapted this over the years to the way we work with external collaborators. We are extremely careful about choosing who we work with. When we find someone we think can really make our games shine, we show them what we are working on and why it would be great to work with them. We listen to their ideas and try to see if they are truly excited about the project. We aren’t perfect and neither are our projects but we put it all upfront so everybody knows what they are getting into. We spend a lot of effort finding the right people to work with so that we spend less time dealing with team management issues later on.

We ask for a fair quote and we don’t bargain or ask for discounts because we believe people should be paid fairly for their work. No “if things work out, we’ll have more work for you in the future” nonsense. We believe that opportunities in life are fleeting, so we treasure each chance we get to work with great people. If we do work together, we make sure the money to pay them to completion is already in the bank – we never make internal financial issues their problem. If we can’t afford to work with someone, we either find some other way or hope we are able to if our paths cross again in the future, but we never cheapen their work.

Once in a while, we are fortunate enough to have people who want to work with us over longer terms simply because we work well together, so that’s how we grow our cabal. There is a level of trust built by having worked together to create something. People are free to leave because, as individuals, we each value the freedom of choosing what we want to work on. We help one another out with industry contacts, work opportunities, and sometimes just simple cheerleading. We think of ourselves as people who make stuff out of ideas. Strip everything away, including the business, and we’d still be making stuff. This is why we want people who work with us to have a great time doing what they enjoy most.

We’re still finding our way but we’ve learnt a lot from indie teams and companies like Valve who frequently share their ideas. For all this, we try to give back by helping out at schools and industry events by sharing our experience and ideas.

There are a lot of “we”s in this post because we believe these are our responsibilities as independent developers, rather than letting the environment we are in define us and how we treat other people. Business is always personal.

Here’s a little prototype Jason and I have been playing with (requires the free Unity Web Player plugin for your browser).

Click to open Unity Web Player

Credits

• Planet images: Copyright (c) by James Hastings-Trew. http://planetpixelemporium.com/planets.html
• Backgrounds:
  • Public domain by NASA and STScI via http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/entire
  • NASA/courtesy of nasaimages.org. http://www.nasaimages.org/

The event is this Friday, April 29, at 7:30pm at SAE Institute, 20 Upper Circular Road, Singapore 058416, near Clarke Quay. Our two industry guests are:

• Graham Perkins, Rune Entertainment
• Gerald Tock, GAMBIT

So, come on down and join us and bring your questions. Please RSVP here.

We’ve also added support for posting your scores to your Facebook wall so you can do a bit of showing off. Look for the Facebook icon in the Game Over screen.

For iPad players, we’ve fixed the sensitivity of the tilt controls that we messed up in the 1.1 update. Apologies for messing up and for the wait. Let us know if the controls work well for you in this version.

Finally, there’s also a prompt to Rate and Review the game that appears after you’ve played the game a number of times. If you could help us out here and let us know how you like the game (or not), we would really appreciate it as it’ll help us improve the game.

Note: For iOS devices that don’t support Game Center (iPod touch 1st Gen, original iPhone, iPhone 3G), the game will still be playable, so go ahead and get the update.

The difficulty of the original version was by far the greatest feedback that we received and observed, although most people were really nice about it. Therefore, we decided to focus primarily on balancing the game play first, before adding any other features in future updates.

Instead of just replicating the points in the “What’s New in this version” section from the iTunes page, I’ll go into a bit of detail in this development blog to describe how we addressed those issues from a more technical perspective for those who are interested in game design and development.

Here’s what we did:

• A number of people found it hard to make out the rabbit and the clouds visually, so we added some tinting to the rabbit and the clouds to make them stand out more against the background, while keeping it true to the art style.
• It wasn’t always clear to new players how to control the rabbit since the “Tilt to move rabbit” instructions were only displayed once, so we replaced the “Prepare yourself, little rabbit” message with the “Tilt to move rabbit” text so that it appears before every game. (Thanks, Susanne!)
• Fixed the sideways drifting of the rabbit by applying a sensitivity curve to the input data from the accelerometer, so that you have finer control with small movements, but greater range with larger movements. This reduces drift but allows the rabbit to jump further sideways.
• Increased the jumping height of the rabbit to 2 levels of clouds to provide a greater sense of movement.
• Changed the cloud, coin, and red packet generation algorithm to provide a more gradual increase in challenge based on your current skill. This also fixes the problem where you sometimes get stuck because you can’t reach a higher cloud.
• At Easy level, the rabbit is positioned in the lower third of the screen, and the flow speed is reduced, to give you more time to anticipate oncoming coins and red packets. Clouds that you have passed also stay around a bit longer to provide a safety net in case bunny should fall. This should provide a greater sense of control instead of luck, while being more forgiving.
• At Normal level, the rabbit is in the lower third of the screen, and the flow speed is only slightly reduced. This should provide a balance between control and challenge.
• At Expert level, the rabbit is in the upper third of the screen, and the flow speed is the same as before. With the other game play changes described above, this skill level provides the greatest challenge and perhaps a greater sense of luck vs control, but it still depends on your skill in the game to control the challenge.

So, get the update and let us know how it plays for you.

Art Style

This form of ink and wash painting is shared across several East Asian cultures, including Chinese shui-mo hua (水墨画), Japanese sumi-e (墨絵), and Korean sumukhwa (수묵화). The most important feature in traditional chinese water painting is the brush stroke. Each stroke is deliberate – its movement, the density and flow of the ink, the water content in the ink, and how it contacts the paper surface and is absorbed by it, is what gives this form its unique character. Capturing these subtle aspects and nuances in digital format was important to us.

Selecting an Artist

The backgrounds and set pieces were done by Darius Cheong, a freelance artist based in Singapore, and a recent graduate of the Feng Zhu School of Design.

Style sample by Darius Cheong

Here in Singapore, there are quite a few masters at traditional water painting in the Chinatown area, mostly doing paintings and calligraphy for tourists and art collectors. However, I felt it would have been too slow and limiting to have them paint on rice paper, scan, review, and do changes. So, we hit up all our contacts, including the art schools, to see who could do this art style digitally. We had around 5 or 6 artists submit samples and chose Darius because we really liked his ability to capture the style beautifully in digital format.

He was also very professional and had experience with freelance work. In the end, everything went really smoothly and we would love to work with him again.

Concept

Conceptually, we first split the scenery into a mostly white background that hinted at the backdrop of the mountain, and foreground set pieces that would provide detail as the player scrolled upwards.The set pieces are “components” of a mountain, such as bamboo forests, streams, waterfalls, cliffs, temples, bridges, etc. We then did some tests to see how the backgrounds would blend with the different set pieces, feathering the edges with white and alpha to blend them. Chinese mountains typically feature a lot of mist and clouds so that helped us naturally.

Set piece

References

• http://www.china-family-adventure.com/stone-forest-china.html
• http://www.china-family-adventure.com/chinese-mountains.html

Background

Our initial plan was to introduce different categories of set pieces for the different seasons on a mountain, presented procedurally in a progressive manner based on altitude as you go up higher and higher, but for now, they are just selected randomly.

The backgrounds behind the set pieces are full screen resolution backdrops because we were going to do infinite looping parallax scrolling with them. During our initial art tests, mountain peaks and distinctive distant scenery made the set pieces feel like they were floating in the air, similar to scenes in Avatar. This wasn’t what we wanted, and we realized that the backgrounds had to present very loose shapes and silhouettes hinting at the mountain rock face, in contrast with the more detailed set pieces.

Technical

We initially fixed the texture sizes of all the set pieces to control memory usage, but we later loosened this rule and had him do larger pieces that would scroll more than one screen. This really helped present a more majestic background.

Each set piece was initially a separate PNG file but were later compiled into spritesheets using Texture Packer Pro. This helped with memory and load times, especially when running on the iPhone/iPod as we were able to squeeze several of the smaller ones into single PNGs. Due to our limited use of colours, we were able to use RGBA5555 for the texture format. Going lower displayed visible artifacts. In the code, each set piece sprite is parented under the SpriteBatchNode so they also render more efficiently.

In addition, we wanted to support all the different resolutions for iPhone, Retina HD, and iPad, so we had two Texture Packer Pro project files, one for iPad, and another for iPhone and Retina with the automatic option to export the sd (standard definition) resolution spritesheets. We created an XCode project to automate the processing of all the Texture Packer Pro (.tpp) project files, which helped save a lot of time whenever the art was updated.

The background PNGs were RGB888 without alpha but we did not put them into spritesheets as they are all at full screen resolution. We wanted to keep our largest texture size at 1024×1024 so that we could support iPod and iPhone 3 and older hardware. Code-wise, we tried using the Parallax node that came with cocos2d, but it was not designed with infinite looping of full sized background textures in mind, so we wrote our own for that (needs some refactoring clean up).

All the source artwork was done for the native iPad resolution and scaled down and cropped to maintain the aspect ratio for lower resolutions.

Our final app size on the App Store is 26.6MB, with Universal support using 3 different sets of spritesheets for 320×480, 640×960, 768×1024.

The animated sprites for the rabbit were done by Jonathan Ang, another Singapore artist and graduate of FZD. I’ll put up another post on that if there’s interest in it.

Collect as many Lucky Coins and Red Packets as you can and see how much luck can you get for the Year of the Metal Rabbit! Tilt your phone to move your bunny, jump on the clouds to ascend the beautiful mountain. But be careful: some clouds can be tricky!

Get it now for iPhone, iPhone 4 Retina, iPad, and iPod touch at a great price! Available in all iTunes stores worldwide in English, Chinese, and Vietnamese. We will be updating it with Japanese and Korean soon.

On December 29th, I came back to it but based the concept around a simple platform jumping game, like Doodle Jump and Mega Jump, with a theme of “finding luck” and well, a bunny on a quest. I also wanted a traditional Chinese Water painting art style (as part of an entire series of painterly style games that I’d like to do some day), with mountains shrouded in mist and clouds and a more flow-based pacing for gameplay to help players achieve zen ;).

I got pretty excited and called up Jeffrey and Travis from Touch Dimensions (a Singapore-based indie studio that we’ve wanted to work with for a while) immediately and Jeffrey suggested we meet up that evening to talk more about it.

The next day, we did a prototyping session at Touch Dimensions and in a few hours, Travis had a working version of the core gameplay with the rabbit hopping on clouds and a way to procedurally blend mountain background set pieces, using placeholder images we found on Google Images. He did this despite a a bad tummy, which is testament to how awesome he is.

Jason tried it out and liked where we were going with this. We got a few friends to try playing it and while it was certainly quite rough, people kept playing to get higher and higher and loved the visual style.

A Fork in the Road

After some deliberation, we’ve now decided to to take a few weeks off from Shuffleboard Vikings to focus on this game and try to ship it for the Chinese New Year, which falls on February 3rd this year. That means we have to submit it to Apple by the 3rd week of January at the latest. It’s going to be really tight and we haven’t even decided on the artists who can help us pull this style off, but we figured we’d post about it to keep our progress updates as open as possible and also to ask you guys for some help. So, here it is:

Call for Help #1

Business-wise, we figured this would be a great way to get something on the App Store faster. Our main markets will probably be countries where the Lunar New Year is celebrated, iPhone devices are selling well, and where people seem to be willing to pay for apps (all anecdotal). This probably includes Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Japan could be a great market for us too, even though they’ve already celebrated their new year. China, Vietnam, and Thailand could be great too, but we aren’t as sure about their willingness to buy apps, but they could be pretty big markets if we get featured by Apple on the App Store. Another possibility is to partner with one of the local publishers there to get as much reach as we can.

Call for Help #2

We also realize that games released for specific occasions typically have short lifespans and need to be released either just before or on a specific date, but there’s a lot we think we can do with this game, including adding the other creatures from the Chinese zodiac, more beautiful landscapes, different types of power ups, and different ways for players to make their ascent into the heavens.

So, stay tuned to see how this crazy adventure turns out!