RoChain Dev Diary Part 1

Welcome to a new regular feature at TGR in which we will be looking and documenting the life of an Indie game developer looking to get his first release on the iOS & Android App stores.  This said Indie developer is handsome, charming, charismatic and an all round good bloke… just so happens that’s me!

So, what’s this all about then?  Well, the intention is to give you a little bit of an insight into the life of a game developer whilst said game developer holds down a full time job and has a (very) hectic family life too!  Firstly, a little bit about me.

I’ve been game developing since I received my first computer at the age of 6 or 7 ; a brand new beige Commodore 64 complete with tape deck and room heater (aka power supply).  From the very first time I loaded up a game I was intrigued as to how it worked, what made the little Pac-Man move around the screen? How did the ghosts know where I was going to move to? Stuff like that intrigued me and so when I received a “program your own games” book for Christmas I was well away. Typing in the lines and lines and lines of code required to get a very badly drawn skier to slalom down my screen was exhilarating and I’ve never looked back since, writing my first game at the age of 13 in BASIC and saving it to tape, only for the tape to be erased when I left it too close to my stereo system!   Since then I’ve dabbled in various languages until very recently dipping into C++ and C# and learning about Object Oriented Programming.  Given my advancing years (i.e over 30) it’s really difficult to learn new concepts/ways of working but what I do find is that when they stick, they stick much better…. Anyway, I digress.

Essentially me and a couple of other coders and an Artist knocked up a game in the summer of last year called RoChain. It was (and in places still is) available for PC only and was more a proof of concept than anything else. It was my first C++ project and was a really fantastic learning curve in terms of code design/structure etc.  What always struck me about RoChain was how fabulous it would be on a mobile device.  The game would require a bit of a re-design but nevertheless the idea lends itself more to a mobile device than a PC – hence it was always my goal to get it on iOS/Android devices if possible.

Then life sort of hit me a bit – LOTS happened and coding really took a back seat whilst things got back on track.  Things are now back on track and coding has recommenced.  RoChain mobile lives again and is enjoying something of a super quick development cycle at the moment.  I propose to write these blogs on a fairly regular basis to keep you chaps and chapesses up to speed on the development cycle and my highs and lows over the next few months as I bring this little baby of mine to life!

Also, feel free to comment and ask questions – it’s good for me/us to engage with the audience a little and get some feedback as we go along – and it’s also a great chance for the audience to become involved and ask lots of questions I can’t answer!

So sit back and enjoy as a game takes shape and becomes a reality on the various app stores!