Of course I've been through a couple of phases in the last year; rap-battling, wearing fake beards and most recently wet-shaving my head so I can be like Bane, but this is exciting and not me just acting like an arsehole.
Myself and my very good friend Mr. Terry Cook, are making an iPhone game called Sub Trub. Work in progress...
Terry and myself have a long history of fadding together. We both took up barbershop singing together in the Granite City Chorus, at Uni we had a semi-successful hit of Arnold Schwarzenegger themed online-comics called "Ahnee Camics" and we shared a rather intense summer of sailing down some of Aberdeen's hazardous rivers in a variety of cheap inflatable dinghys that ended so badly the first thing Terry's mum ever said to me was "Oh, are you the one that nearly died?".
We've also had about a hundred thousand ideas we've never done anything about, until now.
It all started with a rather inspirational gentleman called Trey Smith (http://www.treysmithblog.com/) who is a mobile game developer who shares his experiences through his blog and some overly enthusiastic dude-American, but unusually likeable videos. He basically started by coming up with a shit idea on paper, hiring a programmer who knew what they were doing, and getting them to make a decent version of his shit idea.
We thought we could do that, and maybe even come up with a good idea in the first place.
So we designed Sub Trub, it's an underwater scroller where you play a little submarine trying to escape an ominous sea-monster that is pursuing you. Think of a cross between Finding Nemo and the underwater chase in The Phantom Menace when Obi Wan and Liam Neeson are trying to get to the Gungan City. Then re-cross all that with that helicopter game where you have to stop it crashing into stuff.
And that's our game, which should hopefully look something like this:
Terry has done all the graphics for it. We both did graphicy stuff at Uni, and both do graphicy stuff as a living, but I'm shit at coming up with cool looking stuff unless I've copied it from a photo.
(As a side note, check out Terry's watercolour paintings https://www.facebook.com/pages/Terry-Cook-Paintings/421174241278869?ref=ts)
So what I did was make a mahoosive PDF that details every single detail of the game design and spent a week putting ads on various freelancer websites trying to find someone who could make the fucking thing. This is the ad I put up.
We are looking for a talented developer with proven experience working on iPhone games.
The game we are developing is a fun little underwater side-scroller with procedurally generated obstacles that increase in difficulty. Further details of the game will be disclosed upon introducing yourself as a possible candidate.
We will initially be looking for a prototype, then if you are the right person for the job, the full game and future games as well.
The right candidate will have passion for games and be invited to offer input on design and ideas, but for the most part will be provided with the graphics to use. We are also looking for someone who is honest about their abilities, easy to work with and has a compatible personality with the two team members they will be working with, as humour and style will play a major part in this games appeal.
Please respond with examples of previous work, ideally links to app store games you have worked on. In your response please include your favourite Schwarzenegger quote so we know you have read the whole post and have the right priorities in life.
Many thanks
Now, I would like to point out that that last line was probably the most important one, from the 150-ish replies I got from people from all across the world, 70% of them did not give me an Arnie quote and were immediately binned. What is more interesting is that only one person out of the rest actually gave an Arnie FILM quote, the rest gave shit that he'd said in real life, which I guess shows you the difference in how artists and programmers truly think. It would never occurred to me to quote "For me life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer."
I'd have much more likely said something like
"It's not a dog, it's a ferret.................. Hello, I'm interesting in the ad for your project. it sounds interesting...."
Anyway, from those that made it past the first round, most of it was generic pasted replies from Indian developers, money obsessed replies from Westerners and "I make rite game for you dearest man" styled chat from the oriental candidates - it was looking bleaker than an ALDI's staff room. Until one chap came along on vWorker.com from Ukraine. He had an excellent rating from 80 previously completed projects, better English than Hugh Grant's great Aunt and an actual noted interested and passion for making games. After much back and forth, he digested my biblical PDF file, asked questions, made suggestions and it was soon clear that he was the man for the job. We had decided to be extremely picky about hiring a programmer, there is no room for wasting money on uselessness, and this guy was a very, very good find, because no-one else got considered.
At the time of writing we are sitting on a pretty cool "proof of concept" demo that he knocked up in a week, that I have running on my unused iPhone 3GS right in front of me. It's exciting, it's actually, probably hopefully, must be going to be a game in the app store, hopefully within the next couple of months. There is still a shit load of stuff to figure out, Apple don't make it simple, they have high standards and a lot of shit to read and a lot of shit to forge understanding, but look out for it towards the end of the year and give it a whirl.
Disclaimer: If you have an suggestions for the development of this game, shove them up your ass-butt. Serious.
Thanks guys!
