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[Continuing a series of interviews with 2010 IGF Mobile finalists, FingerGaming speaks to Jetro Lauha and Jani Kahrama of developer Secret Exit, whose iPhone game Stair Dismount is competing in the Best Mobile game category, having won the IGF Mobile award for Technical Achievement.]
Before they released Zen Bound, the nearly indescribable puzzle game which remains one of the iPhone’s killer apps, Finnish studio Secret Exit worked on a series of physics centric, stair tumbling computer freeware games in Porrasturvat, or Stair Dismount (“the ultimate stairflight simulator”), and sequel Truck Dismount.
Seeing the player push a hapless Kubrick-alike, Mr. Dismount, down a flight of stairs in order to “inflict massive damage to every weak point!”, the game has more in common with their aforementioned iPhone debut than meets the eye, most noticeably being another technical marvel, the recent iPhone version earning the IGF Mobile Technical Achievement award.
Taking time out from working on their sequel to Zen Bound (“… we’ve been totally tunnel-visioned with getting Zen Bound 2 ready”) Stair Dismount mastermind Jetro Lauha and cohort Jani Kahrama took time out of their busy schedule to speak to FingerGaming about the development of their IGF Mobile finalist sequel, a whole eight years after it first saw release on the PC.
What is Secret Exit’s background in game development?
Jetro Lauha: We have strong background with practically all flavors of mobile games development, from previous companies our people have worked in. Still, all of our coders share interest for various platforms so we do have some insight about desktop and console platforms as well.
Can you tell us what development tools your team used to create Stair Dismount?
JL: We leveraged many open source libraries such as Irrlicht and ODE. The levels are authored with irrEdit accompanied by our own custom-developed plugin and postprocessing tools. The workflow could always be better, but in the end the choices we made have still saved us a huge amount of time. Without getting OpenGL ES port of Irrlicht from the community it could be that we’d never even have made the iPhone version.
How long was the iPhone version in development?
JL: About 3 months in full production leading to first release version. But before that there was many shorter periods of pre-production work which is harder to quantify, especially because the iPhone version codebase was directly based on earlier prototype running on desktop.
How did the initial concept come about?
JL: Years ago I almost fell on the stairs, barely saving myself by grabbing handrail. This led to me thinking about making a game about falling down in stairs, created with a rich physics simulation which was still very new thing back then (2002). Ironically Stair Dismount doesn’t have handrails or the like, so Mr. Dismount doesn’t have much of a chance to save himself.
Stair Dismount won the IGF Mobile Technical Achievement category primarily for its impressive physics engine. Did you have any trouble recreating what you had already achieved with the PC version on the iPhone?
JL: Luckily the ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) has matured a lot along the years following the first PC version. This allowed us to actually re-create the rag doll to be better than ever in the iPhone version, although it increased the simulation complexity as well.
Getting something to run is fairly easy, as a test. But it tends to take lot of time to hand-tune things to behave better and generally feel like really having an impact. Surprisingly the new iPhone version still shares some considerable bunch of code from the original PC version (and sequels) way back from 2002, so not everything had to be rewritten.
Do you think functionality like the Facebook integration seen in Stair Dismount is important to indies on iPhone?
JL: Simple feeding of status updates to Facebook isn’t really very compelling. So integrating this kind of functionality shouldn’t be any compulsory thing to have if it doesn’t give any real additional value to the user.
Jani Kahrama: It’s ironic, but I wish we knew! The photo feature we have in Stair Dismount is really nice and elegant, but we haven’t implemented any way of tracking if people are using the feature. On the other hand, we’ve seen a sudden rise in the popularity of Stair Dismount Lite, so at least the feature is doing its part to enable word of mouth.
Why did you choose to self-publish, as opposed to your previous iPhone effort, Zen Bound, which was handled by Chillingo?
JK: There’s really no mystery to publishing, it’s simply work that involves preparing appealing marketing materials, talking to media and taking advantage of opportunities to get visibility for your game. It’s up to each developer to choose if they want to do that work themselves, or leave it to someone else.
Have you played and enjoyed any of the other IGF Mobile finalists?
JL: I have played a few of them. I liked especially Minigore (honorable mention), Mind Wall (honorable mention) and Spider: The Secret Of Bryce Manor.
What do you think of the current state of the indie scene, particularly in relation to the mobile space?
JL: Device fragmentation issues continue to be so ugly and most manufacturers aren’t really trying enough at all to fix them. App Store has been great change for many, but on the other hand the race to bottom with prices has really hurt many developers so badly that it is becoming very risky to do bigger projects with high production values.
[...] Road to the IGF Mobile: Stair Dismount Developer Secret Exit "Taking time out from working on their sequel to Zen Bound, Stair Dismount mastermind Jetro Lauha [...]