iMech : 3D online robot deathmatch

This was our development breakout app. Back in 2009, during the era of 3G and iPhone 1, our tiny Flying Dino team managed to create this bleeding-edge piece that solidified our game dev career paths.

Prior to that, working at Namco Networks America, I had been stuck porting feature phone games like Dig Dug and Ms. Pac-Man onto endless J2ME and BREW handsets. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t loath it, and I learned a ton, and I’m forever grateful that GenPlay and Namco got me into the gaming industry, but after having tasted what it was like creating games rather than fixing them, it was hard to go back.

Namco had assigned me as the sole developer for a J2ME title called “Worst Case Scenario” (after the popular survival-themed books). It was a basic UI-based trivia game, but I had so much fun working with artists and designers and sound engineers that I became incredibly dejected once my boss showed me my upcoming schedule shortly after publishing the game; I was to port it onto hundreds of feature phones over the next year, and I felt crushed.

So Dave and I left Namco and started Flying Dino Games – first publishing Orbitsu while Dave worked on a real-time multiplayer game server, and then finally this!

We thought up of this game while we were checking out iDracula by Chillingo. At first, we were going to make a 3D Mech version of iDracula, but while prototyping, we tried throwing the camera behind the player instead of fixed above, and we found it to be much more immersive to “drive” the Mech and aim from behind the shoulder. The UI and weapon design were inspired by Mechwarriors, a game that Dave and I both grew up loving.

I did a majority of the iOS client work, adapting a basic 3D engine written in C that Ray dug up from his university days. I dug up my old Quake 2 model parser that I wrote while trying to get my first job after college. Dave did all the back-end work and figured out how to use Blender and export to MD2 file formats, and I figured out how to move them around in a 3D world with 3D lights and (kinda) flashy particle effects that I learned from making Orbitsu’s eye candy. I did all the camera work and controls, trying to give each weapon a unique feel. I also had to interface with the server, compressing real-time positional and trigger data into as few bits (not bytes) as possible. We made a tile-based map editor that was inspired by Starcraft, created a basic collision system to keep players on the map and to register different kinds of projectile hits (bullets, lasers, cannons, missiles, flamethrowers, land mines), and we were off!

It got a great review from IGN at 8.5/10 here.

IphoneGamerUK posted a gameplay video too.

It peaked at top 10 under the Games section on the App Store when it was featured on the store.

Unfortunately, we weren’t making anywhere near enough money to continue, and our not so business-savvy selves decided to get jobs at Digital Chocolate instead. Still, it was such a pleasure creating this game, I’m not quite sure how to verbalized it.