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Welcome to the very first Equilibrio Developer Diary. This column is intended to give you some insights about what’s going on in an independent game studio which is currently working on its first iPhone project called Equilibrio.
My name is Bruno Urbain, and I’m one of the founder and design director of a small independent studio called Fishing Cactus which officially opened its doors in summer 2007 in Belgium. I’ve been working in the gaming industry for something like 10 years. I started with mods development and quickly moved to the pro category. I’m a full time game designer since a little bit more than 5 years. To speak a little bit more about Fishing Cactus, our primary focus is to develop games on digital platforms, iPhone is the one in which we have strong feelings for.
We’ve been recently promoted as official iPhone developers and started a project called Equilibrio (a port of a Wiiware title developed by DK-Games). It is our first iPhone project and we started it only 3 months ago. Equilibrio is a 3D game with a similar gameplay to Monkey Ball since you have to control a ball from point A to point B. Even if the game is in 3D, the game is played in 2D. You control the different types of balls by tilting the iPhone left or right. You can control 5 types of balls which all have different properties and weight. For example the paper ball can fly a little bit while the iron ball never breaks. This creates tons of gameplay experiences that we captured in the levels (this will be the subject of another dev diary). More generally I can say that the core experience of the game feels more like a Sonic game in the way that you have to do loops, smooth landings, jump over ramps or avoid deadly obstacles.
For Fishing Cactus, Equilibrio is a probe project. With this project we are going to probe the market and see if the app store is a viable market for mid-scaled projects. Every two weeks, I’ll try to give you some information about the problems we faced or the tools we used to develop the game on iPhone. Later on I hope I’ll be able to share about reviews impact and, if possible, sales.
That’s it for this week. In the meantime if you want me to dig a specific subject, don’t hesitate to shoot in the comments section.
See you in two weeks.
Wich technology are you using? An In-house or a 3rd party 3D engine?
Cool, I am eager to see how your experience goes! Thanks for posting.
We are using an in-house 3D engine using Collada as exporter.
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