This is a story about how I took an idea and made it into a commercial game. In this article I will try to focus on how to get a game done - a problem many independent developers face. During the development of my game, Asterope, I took a lot of screenshots from many of the development stages that show how the game gradually came to life. Hope you enjoy the read and learn something!

Who am I?

My name is Niklas Wahrman, I’m 24 years old and live in Finland. I’ve worked on numerous mobile phone games including Constantine, Superman: Lex’s Payback and The Blade of Zorro. I study computer science but spend more time on my personal projects than university – just as one should in my opinion!

Asterope in a Nut Shell

I want to start at the end and tell you what the final product became. Asterope is a game that completely relies on one gameplay element: the ability to control a flying ship by shooting out a rope (that works kind of like the ninja rope in the famous game Worms). The ship flies constantly forward and by grabbing hold of whatever surrounds you with a rope you can alter the ship’s direction. The game has a story of how an asteroid was nearing Earth at a blazing speed but just as it got very close to Earth, it stopped. So Earth sent a space shuttle to check it out, but the space shuttle got sucked into the asteroid. Nobody wanted to go on a rescue mission, fearing they would suffer the same fate as the astronauts. That’s how the player comes into the picture – on a mission to rescue the astronauts. The story has a twist later on when the player discovers the asteroid is really a machine controlled by the Androids on a mission to invade Earth.

Asterope in action

How It All Began

Someone asked me the other day how I came up with the idea for the game. I could not remember at that time, but the answer came to me later on. The idea came from when I learned to do rope physics after having found an amazing article on the subject by Thomas Jakobsen. I’ve always enjoyed physics simulations on computers so ofcourse I had to implement the technique Jakbosen teaches. It’s typical for commercial games to have one or many designers, brainstorm sessions and so forth where they come up with ideas for games and then hand the idea to the developers to implement them. But I did it the other way around, and I think that is profound and a great strength for us independent developers. Instead of coming up with solution on how to implement ideas, we can come up with ideas around our solutions. So a big development challenge was already won before the development of the game was started.

The idea about the spaceship and the asteroid came one day when I was walking home from class. Creative ideas usually come when you do something other than sit in front of your computer and let your right part of the brain work. Asterope was actually meant to be a J2ME (Java2 MicroEdition) game. J2ME games suffers from the annoying fact that you can only press one key at a time; I thought using the arrows to fire a rope would work well in the sense that it would be more of a plan-ahead game than an action game. I also tried to keep in mind that I would do the graphics myself and although I am a capable artist, I’m not that great. So it was vital to keep the design simple so that I could do the art myself.

It wasn’t long after I got the idea that I stumbled upon the Google Android Challenge. What a perfect opportunity to put my idea into action. If I were among the Top50 I would get $25,000! Awesome, I thought to myself. I remember last December when I attended my company’s Christmas party. I had stopped working there recently to be able to focus my full time on my degree and on my own projects. It was around 4am and everyone had had quite a few too many whiskeys and someone asked me what I was going to do next and I explained the idea to them. I find it amazing how now, 10 months later, the product is finished and for sale.

Development Part 1