Only You Can Prevent Dust Bunnies on the iPhone

I spent last weekend at my sister's apartment in Seattle after a long (but fruitful) week at Casual Connect. Now you've got to understand that my sister, while a very talented and gifted coder, isn't too fond of cleaning her room. She had enough clothes strung out among two bedrooms, the living room, and the bathroom to make the inventory manager at Kohl's jealous. And surely, beneath the discarded cardigans and summer dresses, lurked something much more sinister.

Perhaps I should have shown her Attack of the Dust Bunnies, a humorous, fast-paced arcade-style shooter where cleaning day is the last line of defense against a horde of rampaging dust bunnies bent on household domination. Players take on the persona of Klink, a state of the art cleaning machine, and blow away dust bunnies that are invading our personal living space. With Ninja Bunnies, Cockroach Riding Bunnies and Heli-Bunnies, there's more humorous, messy terror than you can handle. Check out a short gameplay video to catch my drift:




Geoff Rowland, frequent user of our community forums and developer from Blue Omega Entertainment took time to talk about developing this unique IP. Enjoy!

What makes your game unique?

The game features a unique, creative view on house cleaning. It features hand-drawn art and a classically animated look drawing inspiration from Tom & Jerry. We really wanted to have people laugh (or at the very least, smile) when they were playing the game, so we added some funny bunny types along with some corresponding humorous sounds.

Where did your inspiration come from?

The concept was created by Adam Diller, Art Director for the studio. The idea came to him when he noticed some filth behind the desk of another artist while they were bouncing ideas off each other. Oddly inspired by the dust behind the desk, he began sketching actual cartoon dust bunnies. Originally we looked at it as a simple Duck Hunt-type game. The need for fire power to unleash fury on menacing clouds of dust led to the concept of Klink, the game’s killing contraption. It’s a satirical take on refurbished military equipment - a cross between a war mech and a vacuum cleaner.



The proof of concept for Dust Bunnies was created with the 30-day trial of Torque Game Builder.

What was your development process like?

We created a proof of concept using the 30 day trial version of Torque Game Builder. Developing the proof of concept took us about 3 weeks. Once we were happy with our prototype, we purchased Torque 2D for the iPhone and developed the idea into the finished product you now see on the AppStore.

We chose Torque for several reasons. The biggest reason is that source code is included with the licenses. Additionally there is a large existing user base of Torque users, so we knew we could draw upon the community if we ran into any issues. Finally, we knew if we wanted to port our game to other platforms, it would be fairly easy since Torque runs on many different platforms.

We had 15 people that worked on the game in one form or another (Programmers, Producers, Designers, Artists, QA, Marketing, etc). It took about 5 months total to develop. We were working on finishing up Damnation during this time as well, so some of our time was spent working on issues unrelated to Attack of the Dust Bunnies.

What tools did you use to create the game?

The main tools used were Torque 2D for the iPhone, Visual Studio2005, Xcode, Photoshop, Perforce and 3DsMax. The programmers would test out new features on the PC before porting it to the Mac. Game assets were mainly drawn in Photoshop (using Cintique Tablets), and the dust bunny animations were created in 3Ds Max. We used Perforce for source control.

How did you accomplish QA and beta testing?

We took advantage of friends and family as well as just about every employee in the company. While several of us already had iPhones to test on, we purchased several 1st and 2nd gen iPod touches to do additional performance testing. Apple provides an easy way to get your app on devices that aren’t developer devices (Distribution Ad-Hoc profiles), so it was quite easy to get the game on devices outside of the office.



These bunnies are packing some serious heat. Watch out for the Ninja Bunny!

Describe 2-3 of your biggest technical hurdles.

The biggest technical hurdle for us was optimizing Torque 2D for the iPhone. After just over a month of development time, it became apparent that we could not use TorqueScript for the majority of our game. The very first time we ran Attack of the Dust Bunnies on the iPhone, it was running around 2 FPS - this was when the game was mostly written in TorqueScript. Thanks to the users on the forums, we soon discovered components. It became apparent fairly quickly that we needed to convert most of our TorqueScript code into native C++ components. Luckily there is an example included with Torque 2D for the iPhone that uses components, which helped with the development process quite a bit.

Another issue we ran into was load times. If a game takes longer than 30 seconds to load, it will exit. We had to develop a custom datablock solution that would only load content when it was needed. This helped greatly, but we still ran into issues on older devices. This led us to spread out loading across various sections of the game. For example, only the bare essentials are loaded at the start of the game. We then display a “Press Start” splash screen. Once the user touches the screen, more of the game is loaded. Once a level is selected, the rest of the game is loaded. Using this approach allowed us to cut down on loading times a bit.

Describe any challenges or issues you had getting published in the AppStore.

We had no problems getting published in the AppStore. It did take a bit longer than expected since we submitted around the time the final 3.0 SDK had been released. It took just over 3 weeks for our game to get approval from Apple.

If you had to do it all again, what would you change about creating this game?

There are not many changes we would make to the game. The biggest difference would be trying to develop the game using mainly C++ rather than developing it in TorqueScript first and then converting it to C++.



Using components boosted FPS on later versions of the game.

Thanks, Geoff, for the interview. It made showing off Torque 2D for the iPhone really easy at Casual Connect last week. Shout out for marketing intern, Kris Nelson, who helped me edit and review this interview.

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