I met Eric around two years ago through mutual friends that lived near him through ultimate frisbee and some Guitar Hero (back in the day when Ben A. sucked and cried about his hand hurting when he played tensed-up claw-style… man I can barely recall those days).
Since I started working, I don’t get on Facebook all too often, but I was checking it randomly one day and saw that Eric had changed his status to something about looking for someone to help him with the graphics for his iPhone game. I’ve always liked drawing and digital art (like when Facebook Graffiti came out, I drew a lot for awhile), so I sent Eric a message to let him know I was interested and to get a bit more information. That was on April 4th. Eric got back to me and told me more about the game and showed me a link to the game (version 1.0) on iTunes.
I had played the Flash version of Defend Your Castle (the game inspiring StickWars) before. I remember it being pretty hard with just a mouse. However, it sounded like the perfect game to play with touch. I booted it up on my tablet pc (which accepts touch) and played it with my fingers and found it to be pretty good. At the time, I had an old, cracked-screen iPhone 2G that a friend of mine had given me once he upgraded to a 3G. However, it wasn’t running on the required firmware, so I couldn’t try the game. So, when I first started working on the graphics, I found myself visiting the gamedroid.net review of the 1.0 version of the game. This gave me a good idea of how the game played (well) and looked (not half as good as it played, in my opinion).
So when I first started, my task was to give StickWars (”StickWars - Siege” at the time) its own distinctive style and look.
There was a bit of hating on StickWars when it first came out, with people calling it a Defend Your Castle copy. In Eric’s defense, when he started the game, it had been more of a project to learn Objective-C. Only when he realized how fun it was did he decide to release it. Furthermore, he recognized a problem and made conscious decisions to address them (ie. bringing in external help). There are still plenty of haters and fanboyism out there, which is unavoidable, but I feel that quite a bit of it is just blind and unwarranted. StickWars is now very different, and, in my biased opinion, better.
Back to the topic at hand, though. The first thing I thought when I started was that the scaling of the graphics was a bit odd. The castle looked like the size of a small home. So, I thought we could change the castle out with just the wall of a castle. So I searched for some castle inspiration online and drew random things in Photoshop (CS3). The first mockup I sent off to Eric was this:
Ahhhahaha… wow, sucks. Excuse: I wasn’t done? Wow, I dunno… But man, what a well-constructed and straight castle wall. I was about to start on the ground, it looks like. I sent that off to Eric to see if he liked the direction. I forget what happened, but I’m just going to assume he thought it was crap and told me to redo it. But he did seem to like the wall direction. One of the things I kept in mind during this entire process was how the graphics would integrate into the game. At the time, I’d never seen a line of code and knew nothing about Xcode, Objective-C, Cocos (I’m just throwing out these terms, but I really still know next to nothing about them). As Over the past few weeks, Eric’s told me of a lot of how the graphics are in coded into the game regarding positioning, etc. But when I first started, I thought it would be easier for Eric if we kept the “wall-line” in the same area. So you might notice that the line where the men will start attacking the wall stays pretty constant… not that I would have changed it anyway.
So, I stuck with that and it became more similar to what you see today:
So, that last image is pretty close to what the background looks like in version 1.1. The prison was moved over a bit so you could see the whole thing.
Eric gave me a whole lot of freedom during the process. Whenever I’d send him something looking for feedback or changes he’d like, he was always just more like, “WOW SWEET!” Haha… While I at first hadn’t intended on going a “Great Wall” route (actually, nothing really states it’s the GWC, so for all we know, it isn’t…), during my “Google Image Search”-ing for wall and castle inspirations, the Great Wall came up a lot and it’s just a very cool monument to… massive… human labor….
So the version 1.1 wall with tent upgrades was finished on April 7th and submitted that night around 3AM. Version 1.0, which had been out since April 1, had since climbed into the top 50 paid apps. Eric pulled it down eventually, because he wanted version 1.1 to be the first main version submitted due to the new features (repairmen, wizards, siege, new graphics) and such.
It was a very busy weekend for me. I was just about to move and had a lot of apartment stuff to take care of, but it was still pretty exciting.
Around that time, at the insistence of my self-proclaimed “rich because [he has] an iPhone” friend, Tomas, I jailbroke my iTouch and upgraded the firmware to 2.2.1 (using QuickPwn 225). It was funny, because, at first, it didn’t work and Tomas felt bad. But I got it to work after some Googling (love the internet) and he got all excited, “Do me! Do me!” What a dick, making me a guinea pig… [half] jk, lol. But, I was finally able to play StickWars! It’s a pretty cool feeling to see your work on a commercial device…
So, I want to give thanks to… the friend that gave me my iTouch, Tomas for insisting that I jailbreak it (possibly selfish intentions or not… haha jk), and Eric, for deciding to look for someone to help with graphics through Facebook and then giving me a chance.
A later post will be about the work done this past weekend for 1.2… This update was HUGE, and Eric and I are really excited for it (actually Eric JUST told me he submitted it to Apple just now)
StickWars is on Facebook and Twitter, so Fan/Follow it!
