Marble Blast Mobile: Now Available on the App Store
by Luke Lamothe · 05/15/2009 (7:23 am) · 16 comments
I told myself months ago that I really needed to start making use of my blog here at GarageGames. However, I haven't really had anything to chat about (that I was allowed to at least) as we've been super busy on a bunch of projects here at Luma Arcade. Well, that has finally changed a bit as we have just recently finished Marble Blast Mobile for GarageGames, and it is now available at the App Store, as well as having it's own GarageGames product page.
Overall, we are super happy with how this game turned out. It looks great, plays better, and is a hell of a lot of fun, especially if you are a fan of the "rolling a ball around a level" genre ;)
I'm going to be lazy for now and not bother linking to any new images as you can check out some shot on both the product page as well as the blog of Mr. Brett Seyler, but keep tuned in for some other screenshots when I have some more time, as well as *drumroll*... the world wide premier of the Marble Blast Mobile game trailer, due to hit audiences sometime early next week!
In terms of development, we used iTGE and were quite happy with its capabilities. We may be slightly biased though as we have some pretty good experience with TGE on more than one occasion, but I really do think that it is shaping up to be a great development platform for the iPhone. Obviously though, people who have familiarity with Torque products will be more at ease using it, and will more than likely be able to pull off more than those who are new to Torque, but c'est la vie!
We did have to do some optimisations to the engine to squeeze some additional performance out of it, but hopefully we'll be able to contribute some things back into the engine to help make it a better product, and make the lives of other current / future iTGE users a bit easier :)
Starting out, our main goals for MBM were the following:
1) Try to make the game look as close as possible to the InstantAction version of Marble Blast Online.
2) Make the game the best accelerometer controlled game on the App Store.
3) Give players a fun and challenging experience in both single and multiplayer game modes.
The first task was a bit of a challenge given the technical limitations of the iPhone hardware. The big "bling" in MBO consists mainly of the realtime reflections on the marble, the specular and normal mapping on the world, and the blooming / glow post process effects.
The iPhone hardware (more specifically, the version of OpenGL ES that the iPhone uses) doesn't support any kind of reflection mapping, so realtime reflections were definitely out of the question (not that we would have had the horsepower to do them anyways!). So, we had to create our own software sphere mapping solution in order to get some form of reflection mapping working on the marbles.
OpenGL ES also only supports fixed function pipeline rendering (no shaders!), so normal mapping was out of the question. It does however support DOT3 bump mapping, but we didn't feel like going down that road with the potential overhead that it would cause us to take on. Specular lighting is also not supported by OpenGL ES, so we decided on a method of "fake" specular lighting with projected textures (using a modified version of the shadow casting system in TGE) to "cast" a specular highlight into the world. That along with some other trickery (and damn good texturing by our artists!) allowed us to pull off quite a decent bump mapped effect.
We didn't even bother trying to set up a post processing system in iTGE as we A) didn't think that we'd have the time and B) didn't think that we'd have the fillrate to be able to pull a good one off. All translucent rendering (ie. alpha blending) on the iPhone is noticeably slow, and we didn't want to waste time on something that we were pretty sure wouldn't be usable on the end product. We actually had to go through and remove pretty much all of the alpha blended resources that Marble Blast has traditionally used. I think that the only alpha blended stuff that we have in the game are the glass panels, particles (which we toned down), and the HUD.
The second goal of making killer accelerometer controls required a lot of trial and error on our part. We had to get the balance of user input correct so that it would be fluid and tight while remaining intuitive. We originally had only had separate camera controls via the touch screen, but after experimenting a lot found that a form of AI camera that would tilt up and down as you changed elevations, as well as rotate to a degree as you turned was a much better way of doing things. We also decided to leave in the ability to rotate the camera by pressing the edges of the screens as more often than not you only need to move the camera horizontally in Marble Blast.
For those "old school" Marble Blast players we also implemented a "dual analog" control system which can be enabled wished. This is similar in style to the Xbox 360 controls where the left stick controls the marble and the right stick controls the camera. This was quite a challenge to get right as there is no tactile feedback given to players from a touch screen interface! To help compensate this we tweaked the interpreted movement values to best suit what we think that the player is actually trying to tell the game that he / she wishes to do. This system turned out pretty good, but I personally still much prefer the accelerometer controls ;)
Lastly, there isn't much technical that I can say about making a fun and challenging game really. The foundations were laid for us already by building upon the already successful and fun Marble Blast franchise. We just had to make sure that we didn't really lose any of that when translating the game to the iPhone. So far, everyone that we know who has had a chance to play the game has had fun with it, so as far as we can tell, we've also succeeded with our third goal. Only time, reviews, and sales numbers will be able to tell for sure though!
***UPDATE***
Check out this awesome video overview of Marble Blast Mobile by 123zc1:
I wanted to close out quickly by apologising for my lame blog layout and spacing skills (they are nowhere near Brett's!) and thank everyone here at Luma Arcade who worked on the game, as well as everyone at GarageGames (you know who you are!) who helped out either with production, ideas, or playtesting for us!
Thanks everyone!
***UPDATE 2***
Check out the new Marble Blast Mobile trailer:
***UPDATE 3***
I'm going to post any kind of video reviews that we happen to come across here...
Nice review by Erik from AppVee.com
***UPDATE 4***
I'm going post cool videos of people playing the game here...
MBFtrace showing you how to play Tri Twist properly
Overall, we are super happy with how this game turned out. It looks great, plays better, and is a hell of a lot of fun, especially if you are a fan of the "rolling a ball around a level" genre ;)
I'm going to be lazy for now and not bother linking to any new images as you can check out some shot on both the product page as well as the blog of Mr. Brett Seyler, but keep tuned in for some other screenshots when I have some more time, as well as *drumroll*... the world wide premier of the Marble Blast Mobile game trailer, due to hit audiences sometime early next week!
In terms of development, we used iTGE and were quite happy with its capabilities. We may be slightly biased though as we have some pretty good experience with TGE on more than one occasion, but I really do think that it is shaping up to be a great development platform for the iPhone. Obviously though, people who have familiarity with Torque products will be more at ease using it, and will more than likely be able to pull off more than those who are new to Torque, but c'est la vie!
We did have to do some optimisations to the engine to squeeze some additional performance out of it, but hopefully we'll be able to contribute some things back into the engine to help make it a better product, and make the lives of other current / future iTGE users a bit easier :)
Starting out, our main goals for MBM were the following:
1) Try to make the game look as close as possible to the InstantAction version of Marble Blast Online.
2) Make the game the best accelerometer controlled game on the App Store.
3) Give players a fun and challenging experience in both single and multiplayer game modes.
The first task was a bit of a challenge given the technical limitations of the iPhone hardware. The big "bling" in MBO consists mainly of the realtime reflections on the marble, the specular and normal mapping on the world, and the blooming / glow post process effects.
The iPhone hardware (more specifically, the version of OpenGL ES that the iPhone uses) doesn't support any kind of reflection mapping, so realtime reflections were definitely out of the question (not that we would have had the horsepower to do them anyways!). So, we had to create our own software sphere mapping solution in order to get some form of reflection mapping working on the marbles.
OpenGL ES also only supports fixed function pipeline rendering (no shaders!), so normal mapping was out of the question. It does however support DOT3 bump mapping, but we didn't feel like going down that road with the potential overhead that it would cause us to take on. Specular lighting is also not supported by OpenGL ES, so we decided on a method of "fake" specular lighting with projected textures (using a modified version of the shadow casting system in TGE) to "cast" a specular highlight into the world. That along with some other trickery (and damn good texturing by our artists!) allowed us to pull off quite a decent bump mapped effect.
We didn't even bother trying to set up a post processing system in iTGE as we A) didn't think that we'd have the time and B) didn't think that we'd have the fillrate to be able to pull a good one off. All translucent rendering (ie. alpha blending) on the iPhone is noticeably slow, and we didn't want to waste time on something that we were pretty sure wouldn't be usable on the end product. We actually had to go through and remove pretty much all of the alpha blended resources that Marble Blast has traditionally used. I think that the only alpha blended stuff that we have in the game are the glass panels, particles (which we toned down), and the HUD.
The second goal of making killer accelerometer controls required a lot of trial and error on our part. We had to get the balance of user input correct so that it would be fluid and tight while remaining intuitive. We originally had only had separate camera controls via the touch screen, but after experimenting a lot found that a form of AI camera that would tilt up and down as you changed elevations, as well as rotate to a degree as you turned was a much better way of doing things. We also decided to leave in the ability to rotate the camera by pressing the edges of the screens as more often than not you only need to move the camera horizontally in Marble Blast.
For those "old school" Marble Blast players we also implemented a "dual analog" control system which can be enabled wished. This is similar in style to the Xbox 360 controls where the left stick controls the marble and the right stick controls the camera. This was quite a challenge to get right as there is no tactile feedback given to players from a touch screen interface! To help compensate this we tweaked the interpreted movement values to best suit what we think that the player is actually trying to tell the game that he / she wishes to do. This system turned out pretty good, but I personally still much prefer the accelerometer controls ;)
Lastly, there isn't much technical that I can say about making a fun and challenging game really. The foundations were laid for us already by building upon the already successful and fun Marble Blast franchise. We just had to make sure that we didn't really lose any of that when translating the game to the iPhone. So far, everyone that we know who has had a chance to play the game has had fun with it, so as far as we can tell, we've also succeeded with our third goal. Only time, reviews, and sales numbers will be able to tell for sure though!
***UPDATE***
Check out this awesome video overview of Marble Blast Mobile by 123zc1:
I wanted to close out quickly by apologising for my lame blog layout and spacing skills (they are nowhere near Brett's!) and thank everyone here at Luma Arcade who worked on the game, as well as everyone at GarageGames (you know who you are!) who helped out either with production, ideas, or playtesting for us!
Thanks everyone!
***UPDATE 2***
Check out the new Marble Blast Mobile trailer:
***UPDATE 3***
I'm going to post any kind of video reviews that we happen to come across here...
Nice review by Erik from AppVee.com
***UPDATE 4***
I'm going post cool videos of people playing the game here...
MBFtrace showing you how to play Tri Twist properly
#2
My only issue is that for those of us with an iPod Touch, there's not really any multiplayer unless they are on the same LAN connection. I was really hoping for just straight multiplayer games. But I guess I'm out of luck on that front.
05/15/2009 (12:33 pm)
The game plays great and you did an awesome job in bringing this to the iDevice. My only issue is that for those of us with an iPod Touch, there's not really any multiplayer unless they are on the same LAN connection. I was really hoping for just straight multiplayer games. But I guess I'm out of luck on that front.
#3
Personally, I think that single player is waaaaaaaaaay more fun than multiplayer in MBM anyways.
Let me know when you've got a sub 2 minute Tornado and a 14 second Hop Skip and Jump ;)
05/15/2009 (1:09 pm)
The goal is to have Internet multiplayer as a free update in hopefully not too distant future. We had some problems getting the master server stuff working properly on the device and instead of sitting on a finished product while we tried to sort that out, we made the call to ship the game as it was.Personally, I think that single player is waaaaaaaaaay more fun than multiplayer in MBM anyways.
Let me know when you've got a sub 2 minute Tornado and a 14 second Hop Skip and Jump ;)
#4
05/16/2009 (4:28 pm)
I just got a copy.... I just have to buy an iPod touch on monday now, to play it! :p 
#5
it's funny I was playing minigolf mainia and I wondered if that'll be apearing on the iPhone so I jumped gg saw the blog and bought it.
The multiplayer side would be way wicked, full stars on the app store review, well done guys
05/16/2009 (4:44 pm)
I bought it too, and i've told my son to get it as its way too cooolit's funny I was playing minigolf mainia and I wondered if that'll be apearing on the iPhone so I jumped gg saw the blog and bought it.
The multiplayer side would be way wicked, full stars on the app store review, well done guys
#6
You and the team at Luma did a great job.
05/18/2009 (4:59 am)
Great work Luke, it looks awesome :DYou and the team at Luma did a great job.
#7
05/18/2009 (9:11 am)
Marble Blast Mobile - Designer Postmortem up on Gamasutra: www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JoshuaDallman/20090517/1389/Designer_Postmortem_Porting_...
#8
I've posted some videos above, including the Marble Blast Mobile promo trailer, a nice video review from AppVee.com, and an awesome movie from MBFtrace showing you how Tri Trist should be played!
05/19/2009 (6:19 am)
**UPDATE**I've posted some videos above, including the Marble Blast Mobile promo trailer, a nice video review from AppVee.com, and an awesome movie from MBFtrace showing you how Tri Trist should be played!
#9
05/19/2009 (5:43 pm)
Luke, I got 12 seconds on Hop Skip and a Jump =D 
#11
05/22/2009 (1:17 am)
Oh this game is so fun and pretty! Luma did a great job of adapting Marble Blasts controls to the iPhone. Great work guys! 
#12
05/22/2009 (5:34 am)
Thanks Davey. I remember watching you playing on the 360 in the "garage" last year and talking us through some of the intricacies of the physics and controls. That was crucial to the process we went through over the last few months getting this title ready! Glad you're happy with it. Means a lot. :-) 
#13
Thanks!
06/20/2009 (10:26 am)
Looks great! One question though...how'd you get the 3D tilting iPhone video in the Marble Blast Mobile trailer? I -need- to find a way to do that.Thanks!
#14
06/23/2009 (3:43 am)
MarbleBlast has a tilt meter along the bottom and right and sides of the screen. I assigned a rotation value to the Y and Z coordinates of an image of an iphone in After Effects, or a 3d App if the phone was a model, with the capture parented to it. So, basically, it was just a case of manually key-framing rotation values to correspond with the tilt value on the capture.
#15
01/22/2013 (5:38 pm)
It's not in my App Store 
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