Sudden Games Moves to the iPhone with Sushi To Go

One of the perks of marketing Torque games is that I meet game developers of all backgrounds working on every game project imaginable. Last May, for instance, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sudden Games' Eyal Erez about his debut casual game, Yard Sale Junkie. Incidentally, Eyal was the first person I ever interviewed for our Torque game developer series, and he now holds the honor of being the first developer I've asked for a second interview. Following Sudden Games and their trek into casual games is like watching a living case study of how to "make it" in video games. Now with four games in development and an eye to consoles and other platforms, Sudden Games is really seeing its business take off.

One platform that Sudden Games wants to break into is the iPhone. Having seen the potential to make quick prototypes of 2D games with TGB, Sudden Games was one of the first adopters of iTGB. With this new engine, Sudden Games created Sushi To Go, where you play a turtle that delivers sushi to the inhabitants of the reef. There are many obstacles like hungry sharks and jellyfish you must avoid using the iPhone's unique accelerometer.




Eyal Erez took time out of his busy GDC schedule to answer my interview questions and show off his game in our booth. Enjoy!

What makes Sushi To Go unique?

It’s a hybrid of time management and action games. You have to manage your time, location and the number of items you can carry. The action parts are the obstacles and sharks that you have to avoid on the way to your target.

Where did your inspiration come from?

Originally I wanted to create an underwater Frogger type game with sharks being the cars and with a non-linear environment. I was able to get the Frogger mechanic to work in just one day, so I kept adding more challenging features until I ended up with Sushi To Go.


Sushi To Go was inspired by Frogger. Sudden Games was able to get a Frogger prototype running in about a day and added more challenging features to enhance gameplay and make it unique.

What was your development process like?

It took about 2.5 months to finish the iPhone version of the game. The team consisted of primarily three people. I did all of the programming and level design, and I worked with two artists that contributed all of the static 2D art.

Why did you use Torque to create the game?

Choosing Torque was an easy decision for me. I’ve already released a PC/Mac game using TGB and when GG announced iTGB, I went out and bought an iPhone. As a game designer, Torque allows me to focus on design rather than programming. If I had written the game in Objective C, it would have taken me a lot longer to complete and I would only have an iPhone version. Instead, in 2.5 months I have an iPhone game and a PC/Mac version which took about a week to port; all I had to do was replace the sprites with the original high-res graphics and readjust the GUIs for 800*600. It was that simple. I wrote the whole game using Torquescript alone, not even one line of C++ or Objective C.

Sudden Games LLC (SG) is also an approved Wii developer. We have since been able to take the PC version and drop it “as is” on the dev-kit and it worked like a charm. We are now considering making a local multiplayer version and releasing it as a Wiiware title. Definitely Torque’s multiplatform technology is something that I’m planning on relying on for all of our future games.


"Torque’s multiplatform technology is something that I’m planning on relying on for all of our future games." - Eyal Erez, Sudden Games

What were a few development challenges you encountered?

There weren’t any major challenges, but a lot of mini challenges mostly related to frame rates and memory usage. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one fighting the same issues. The iTGB community is extremely active and every day developers are posting suggestions and workarounds that dramatically improved performance. On top of that, GG developers are scanning these threads and posting their own insight as well as fixes. Altogether, for every problem that I had, I received a solution probably in the first few hours. It really feels like you are working in a team environment. It got to the point where I would ask a question and I already had a few people in mind that I knew would have the answer. I can’t thank them enough; they are consistently making everybody’s life much easier.

What was it like publishing a game on the iTunes App Store?

Since the game was already working on all of my friends' devices, I thought it would be as simple as uploading the app. Unfortunately, it’s a bit more complex and took about a day to get it out there. I actually started a thread in the forum about it, and there are quite a few good tips there from several developers who encountered similar problems.

How did you accomplish QA and beta testing?

We ended up doing the QA using ad-hoc distribution. We sent the game to anyone we knew that owns an iPhone or iPod and a PC/Mac version to anyone who didn’t (another good reason to use Torque, even if you don’t plan on multiplatform). It helped me improve the game and find several bugs; some of them even became features. :)

What did you learn while creating Sushi To Go?

Besides learning how to use iTGB, the main thing we learned is to optimize both memory and performance. Definitely, every game we’ll make from now on will be much more robust.

What are your future plans for Sudden Games?

As mentioned earlier, we are working on a Wiiware title for Sushi To Go and have quite a few ideas for that platform. We also have another game in the making called Bricklash, which is next on the list for completion.


During the QA process, some of the "bugs" actually became gameplay features in Sushi To Go.
Many thanks for Eyal's time and patience, both on this interview and his show-off in our GDC booth. We hope to see more of your games on every platform possible.

For more stories like this, check out GarageGames' Developer Interview series.