Jeff Hangartner – Revealing the Path Less Travelled in Video Game Industry

Jeff HangartnerJeff Hangartner, the founder of the gaming start-up, Bulletproof Outlaws has been a professional developer of games over the last half a decade. Creator of Pixelation, the 1st Pixel Art Forum and also originator of the Pixel tutorials which have been published in the form of a book. Jeff has always been a pioneer of the gaming industry.

CG Today is proud to present Jeff’s exploration as he shares the whole process of creating a start-up right from day 1. With the belief that gaming development is coming back to its original “one programmer in the basement roots” idea, Bulletproof Outlaws is chronicling every step of its start-up process from strategies, to marketing, setting goals and outsourcing, successes and failures. The aim is to help other developers who have ideas but are intimidated by the whole start-up process and are not sure how to go about it.

You can visit his website Bulletproof Outlaws to know more about him or send an email to get connected.

Bulletproof Outlaws - Game 1 - A Diary of a video game studio!

While Derek works on the iPhone version of the game, I’m busy scaling the animations up to iPad size and retina screen size. I actually think the game could get away without a retina version because everything is anti-aliased and cell-shaded so all the retina will do is make things a little sharper (vs a game with photographic elements or 3d, where there are tons of different shades/textures/details), but if it’s an easy port then why not! I have to say once again that I love the iDevice screens…they’re so vibrant and the game looks really good in action with all the glows and such.

So the way we’re going about things, we want to get Derek off the project as soon as possible because he has other projects lined up and this went on longer than it was supposed to. Normally toward the end of the project there’s a bunch of testing where I’d basically play the game and tell him “hey, can you shift this 3 pixels to the left?” and he’d go fix it, then compile a new build, then send it to me, then I’d check it out and say “actually how about just 2 pixels?” and then he kills me in a fit of programmer-rage.

We’re running into some problems getting things going on the iPad. The intro/menus load fine but when it goes to load the gameplay it blows up. Derek suspects that it might be a memory issue, which would make sense…if the iPad is only about as powerful as a 3Gs, but the art we’re loading into it is like twice the size, it’s no surprise it’s going haywire. The iPad 2 would probably have no problems since it’s more powerful, but this is kind of unfortunate. We also figure the iPhone 4 will have no problems with the huge art because it’s pretty powerful, but this iPad lack of power is something to keep in mind in future games.

Today we were trying to get the thing working on the iPad, and we did a little tweaking to the Options menu. Derek got the Options Music/SFX sliders set up, and we were having problems with the iPad blowing up and looking for ways to reduce the art. Derek set things up so that the non in-game textures (aka .PNG files, aka the art) were forcibly purged when the in-game stuff started up, to free up some memory and that was a good step toward getting it working and apparently the magical epic awesome Cocos2D setting that helped save the day is the CC_TEXTURE_NPOT_SUPPORT setting, which “If enabled, NPOT textures will be used where available. Only 3rd gen (and newer) devices support NPOT textures.”

Whew, it was a ton of grunt work and checking and double-checking and triple-checking to make sure all the art and animation files were consistent across all 3 versions (iPhone, iPad, and Retina), and they’re finally all complete. I might have to tweak a little bit (like filling out the credits and external URLs that some menu stuff links to and such), but it’s basically all done. I’m currently running PNGGauntlet on all the art to reduce it down but that’ll take a solid hour so I don’t know how much it’ll save yet.

Bulletproof Outlaws Diary