IncrediBots

I'm Ryan Clark, and I am the designer of IncrediBots.

When I was very young, my family had an "Intellivision" and an Apple IIe computer. Some favourite games were Microsurgeon, Frog Bog, Spy Hunter, Karateka, and Below the Root. I played games as often as my parents would allow me to!

I think I was around 6 years old when I started learning to program on our Apple IIe. My Dad helped me, and I copied a lot of code line- by-line from books and magazines! My friend (and now co-worker) Mike Lee would sometimes read the code out loud while I typed it in :)

The idea for IncrediBots actually came to me while I was investigating physics libraries for another (cancelled) project. During my search I came across this website.

I had a ton fun driving that little tank around, but I was left wanting more! I wanted tanks with arms and hands, I wanted space ships, I wanted walking machines... I wanted IncrediBots! And so, with the help of the amazing Box2D physics library, the game was born.

Our biggest problem has always been dealing with traffic. We have administered databases before, but never under such heavy loads! We tried our best, switching from a small server, to medium, to large, but it wasn't enough. We aren't DB admin pros, by any stretch of the imagination.

So, after many outages and angry fans, we finally migrated our database to Amazon's scalable "SimpleDB". We've had no problems since making the switch! And IncrediBots players are now much happier :)

I'm not sure if it could have been avoided, but when we introduced a few "pay-to-use" premium features, we had quite a backlash from the community. But without the revenue from those features, there's no way we could afford our server costs, and the costs of ongoing development, so I think it was definitely a necessary step.

I think it was about 7 months from start until v1.0. The game is now "complete", but we hope to continue updating it via sequels.

The game was made with Flash AS3. We used Flex Builder, which made things quite a bit easier. And, as mentioned before, the game's physics are based on the open source Box2D physics library

The players themselves. On its own, IncrediBots isn't really a game... it's just a tool. It's the imaginations of our community of players that make IncrediBots great! Just take a look at some of the "featured" robots and replays within the game and you'll see what I mean.

Just that Box2D is an amazing library (it is also used by IGF winner "Crayon Physics Deluxe"), and that Amazon's various web services are very useful if you're expecting a lot of traffic :)

IncrediBots 2, then 3, and all the way up to infinity, we hope!