How/Why I started

One evening I played around with Tiled – a great open source map editor. I wrote some classes in Monkey  to load, handle & render those maps (You can find the source here). I played around with some Turrican sprites. When I played my demo game I just had the idea to do a small platform game for iOS and Android and I came up with Sophia’s World. The complete game for iOS and Android was done in three weeks.

 The graphics

I’m very bad at design and graphics. But I had those lovely graphics from a good friend of mine and found it a good idea to use them. I asked him if he could add some animation to some of the sprites and I think he did an amazing job. I also added some nice platform tiles from Kenney.

The code

The coding part was very easy. I did a few platform games in the past (although i haven’t done one for years), but at least I know where to start and how to do it. Thanks to Monkey I were able to run it on various platforms without any additional work. I think the first level with the first enemy, the player sprite, the map and collision was done in one day – then I added additional things from time to time when I had an idea during I designed the levels (for example the mushroom, the bat and the falling blocks).

Of course I had to fix some bugs from time to time. I worked with various collision layers that I can check against each other but this caused some problems later on. I then added some Interfaces so special objects could be notified when various events are occurring. I hardwired this directly in the collision-layer-code so it felt a little bit hacky because I mixed up two separate solutions (data-driven collision-layer-system with object orientated notify-system).

The level design

Tiled is such a great tool. I’ve tried out lots of level editor tools in the past and never found one I REALLY liked. I love Tiled because it’s very easy to handle but because of the customizable properties, vectors- and Rect-Zones it’s very powerful. Also it’s open source, so if I ever need a special feature I can easily add it. I exported that data to JSON, cause this was an easy way to load the data into my monkey application. I now even use it for GUI-Stuff. For all my new apps/games I build the gui stuff and requesters with Tiled, export it as JSON and load it in into my application.

For the level design itself I first started to analyze various parts of well-known platformers like Mario Brothers or Giana Sisters. The levedesign was the part that took most of the time. At the current version there are 24 stages, but I will add more soon.

I decided to only scroll horizontal, although it would have been easy for me to add an 8-way-scrolling-routine. But I decided to go for right-to-left-levels because I want to keep things simple. The graphic style and everything is targeted for kids and although I love huge jump’n'run games where you can explore each level I don’t want to add this complexity to that game.

The audio & music

The complete sound effects and music was done in about two days. I think I could have put a little bit more effort into the sound effects (and I will probably do) but I was very happy how the music turned out (Listen to it: The Night | The Day).

What’s Next

I think I will add some more levels because a lot of players liked it and already asked for more. And I want to improve the “Get-Ready”-Screen (it was added in a hurry before I submitted the game to the app stores). I will replace it, so the player has some sort of progress map and can select each level he reached before directly.

Some stats

The weird thing about this little project is, that it was my first project that reached more success across Android than iOS. Within the first two weeks it was played more than 150 000 times. This is huge for me. Remember: No marketing. No PR. I just submitted it to Google Play and iTunes and hoped for the best. I will prepare ports for the Amazon App Store and for Windows Phone. I have zero experience with these platforms so I’m very interested how they compare.

Now, help us spread the word, on Twitter, on Facebook, tell your friends about it. But most important: Play it and have fun! It’s free!

Arrr…. (Captain Backwater, 2012)

I’m also working on a flash-based version for Kongregate and Mochi right now. I really hope that a browser-based port will help to spread the word. We’ll see…

For the monetization I decided to go the freemium way. It’s possible to play through the whole game for free. But to unlock the later levels the player need to collect coins. So if he has to less coins to unlock a level he can either go back and play for more coins or can buy some via In-App-Purchases in the shop.

Controls

After a few tweaks the controls turned out great on my iPad. However, as the original game was designed for desktop resolutions in mind, controls are a little bit tricky and frustrating on mobile devices due to the small screen.

I tried several things and also thought about making it available for tablets only, but now I’ve found a solution with that I’m very satisfied. On mobile devices as soon as you enter the game it zooms in the play field. The hit boxes of the items are bigger then and the controls are very smooth. The player is also able to zoom in and out using the typical two-finger touch gesture.

The new look of a mighty pirate

Another thing we changed is the look of the main character. We didn’t like the look of him anymore, so Emmanuel recreated him from scratch. This caused that we had to replace him on some places in-game as well as on the games’ icon. I’m proudly present: The MIGHTY NEW Captain Backwater:

And here how it turned out in lightwave:

Monetization

A lot of time and effort also went into the balancing. As I told in an earlier post, I decided to go for a freemium model. The whole game can be played for free. During the game the player is able to explore hidden coins. To unlock upcoming levels the player has to spent those coins. If he hasn’t enough, he could go a few levels back playing for some more coins or he can order some via In-App-Purchases.

The first attempt was very unbalanced and it forced the player already in the beginning to play the first levels over and over again or spent some real money to buy the required coins. So now I changed it that there are much, much more coins to discover. Also I dropped the prices for the levels to unlock. I’m feeling it’s also much more motivating and rewarding to find lots of hidden coins.

Bugs, bugs, bugs

The rest of time during the last days I spent on hunting bugs, mainly in the GUI System. As I ported the code 1:1 from the desktop version, a lot of things didn’t work on touch devices anymore and OnMouseOut, OnMouseHit and OnMouseOver Events were triggered by mistake. This did take quite some time to figure it out how to fix it, cause the gui system is quite complex and I wrote it two years ago or so .

Performance issues

I had also performance issues on older devices, and the reason for that was the rendering of the in game texts. I’m using Bitmap Fonts for all ingame text. Each bitmap font consists of three layers: Main chars, borders and shadows. Now each frame, each char was rendered in three passes. And this slowed down things quite a bit. I’ve now baked the fonts onto one layer, still rendering each char on each frame – but it’s fast enough at this time. A better solution would probably to pre-render the text that doesn’t change each frame – but for now I’ll leave it that way.

The page has a lot of good articles on apps for kids, so make sure to have a look at it.

It was the best app start I’ve ever had and people seem to LOVE this little gem.
Here is a short demo song of how this app sounds. Get ready to be blown away:

And here are the first user reviews I received:

As you can see, some users complained about the virbation feedback and it’s already fixed in the current version.

• Watch the Trailer / Video

I used FRAPS to recrod the gameplay and iMovie and the blockbuster template to cut it. As I’m very unexperienced with video-stuff I’m very satisfied with the result. I hope you like it:

• Watch Captain Backwater Trailer on Vimeo

This is especially true for Captain Backwater. Believe it or not: The first email I got from Emmanuel (artist of Backwater) with the idea for pirate themed puzzle game was in April 2005 (!!!). Emmanuel attached some cheesy scribbles, here is the original scan:

We had tried out some early gameplay mechanics in two or three prototypes. But nothing seemed to work out. Our game design was poor. Back then, Emmanuel worked with different looks and cel-shaders. After a few weeks (or probably one or two months – can’t remember) we stopped working on Backwater.

In 2007 I had a new idea for an interesting puzzle gameplay. I started to work on it with the “old” graphics from Emmanuel. This time for Nintendo DS, but progress was slowly as I started my new job at Gameforge. When I finished the game in December 2010 JoWood was interested in publishing it, but one month later they went bankrupt. What a great timing!

This was the point when I decided to restart the project for Win, Mac and Linux. I’ve done it using BlitzMax and my own Horizon-Framework.

Everyone I showed the game in the early stages loved the gameplay. Towards the end of the project I stumbled over a blog post from Andra Dogaru. She did an amazing pirate ship, so I asked her if I could use her graphics in the menu section of my game. Andra was excited and even overhauled her work. The result is fantastic I think:

So, what’s next…?

I’m currently very busy with finishing the Linux version of the game. After that, I need to do a free, playable demo version – which is my most important marketing instrument for my direct sales. I also try to get the game into the big casual and indie portals.

I also have already received some feedback from customers. They love it, but they also found some small issues I should fix in an update. I also want to add more languages to Captain Backwater. At the moment, the game is available in german and english. If someone of you is interested in translate it to your native language, please contact me.