Development of the iPhone game, Stair Dismount

Jani of Secret Exit talks about their iPhone version of Stair Dismount

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/secret-exit-gdc-2010-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

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Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco at the IGF Mobile and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Jani: Hi, my name is Jani Kahrama. I’m the head of studio at Secret Exit. We’re a small game developer in Helsinki, Finland.

Interviewer: Well, it’s nice to see you again. I always see you as a finalist in this competition, so that’s great. What was the game this year that got into the finals?

Jani: This year we managed to win the Technical Achievement category with the iPhone version of Stair Dismount.

Interviewer: What inspired you to do that, Stair Dismount?

Jani: Well, the inspiration is really – the first Stair Dismount was out on PC, like, eight years ago. Ever since then, even when we started Secret Exit, we knew that we had to do something with Stair Dismount at some point. The PC version got, like, 2.5 million downloads, and we figured out, “Well, OK, maybe there’s something, too there.” And so, it was a long process. We internally tried a number of different concepts and thinking what the game should be like. Whenever we started thinking about a design and started doing it, we always got a feature crafted beyond our ability to implement it.

Finally, years after the company was founded, we finally got together a combination of features and our level of polish that we were able to put it out. And that’s the status on the iPhone.

Interviewer: What were some of the challenges as you were doing developing for the iPhone? Did you guys use Unity or some other type of system to help with the physics?

Jani: The physics is ODE. Not really taking any challenges. The game is already an adaptation of the PC side of the source code. So, that was actually relatively painless to get running on the iPhone. Much of the work was actually adapting the controls so they’d build on that device that you all, in general, many use and so forth. The mini flow was really important for us to get right, but even then a lot of effort was put on the Facebook implementation.

Interviewer: So, talk about the Facebook implementation.

Jani: All right. So, one of the ways we wanted to improve on the original Stair Dismount was many of the PC users just sent e-mail back then, saying “Hey, I want to put someone’s face on the rag doll.”

Interviewer: Oh yeah, yeah.

Jani: Obviously, we figured out that’s a good idea. We wanted to do it in a way that was going to be easy to access for many people. The first way that you can add a face is simply if you have photos on your iPhone in the Photo Library. But, we figured that it’s still a bit too difficult. Not many are going to snap a shot of someone’s face and then load it into the game. So, we realized that Facebook is a really good place for faces.

And then, we wanted Facebook stuff that we could put in this game to be non-intrusive. Most of the games that you hear that have Facebook features, they just spam your wall with high scores and obsoletes and it’s just intrusive. You don’t want that.

So, what we do is that when you start the game and you pick a face, then it just lists the faces of your friends in Facebook and then you can pick a face. It comes straight on the rag doll, and then you can push them down the stairs. When you find a really nice photo moment, you can grab a photo, and just at the push of a button it uploads that to your Facebook Photo Gallery. So, there’s no additional spamming or anything like that.

It’s just a photo that you upload. It tags it with your friend’s name, and then obviously Facebook sends out notifications to your friends that you’ve uploaded a photo. It’s a very elegant way and not really such a commercial way of doing things.

Interviewer: Did you try the lever accelerometer or anything else to tie into this game?

Jani: We know that there are ways that you could get the accelerometer into the game, but it’s a trade-off in a way. We wanted there to be replays, and there are plans for the future. I don’t want to do comment on anything, obviously, but the idea of having replay and share and record things – there are technical issues why you don’t want the player to give input during the dismount. You want it to be a quick dismount, just one push with the direction, and it’s easier to [?] in the future.

Interviewer: When you talk about recording, will people be able to upload the video with their friends onto Facebook or some other place?

Jani: Well, these are the stuff that we’re thinking about. We have a huge list of stuff that: this would be lovely, this would be great and this would be creditable. And all of it is possible but it really depends on if the game, even now, makes back the cost of its original development. It’s been a long time in development. It was an expensive thing for us, and unfortunately when it came out it really did not make it up the charts as well as we had hoped.

That has changed slightly now. We’re in a very nice position on the US and UK charts. Hopefully, if that keeps up, we will be able to actually make up the money that we put into development. If we reach that, then new features and all that are much more a possibility.

Interviewer: Great. And can you talk about the design philosophy? Has the design philosophy of your studio changed since last year? I know we discussed that last year, you know, just in terms of how you actually create your games.

Jani: I actually don’t even remember what I lied to you last year, but it was probably very convincing.

Interviewer: Yeah, it was. Basically, you just talked about how you were trying to create an interesting experience in the last project, and it wasn’t necessarily – you were trying to create a lasting statement.

Jani: Oh that, oh right. I think we discussed Cinnamon Beats. That was a project that is still up on a shelf somewhere. We may have discussed Zen Bound as well.

Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah.

Jani: All of our game designs are very… I can’t really say we have a fixed process as such. We get ideas and we prototype and if we feel good about it, then we implement. With many of the games that we’ve done, Stair Dismount and Zen Bound, they both have their roots in the demo scene. These things were demoed and tested many years ago. And now with those games we just basically had a production [?] and brought them to a new audience.

Interviewer: And so, what’s next in store for you guys that you can talk about? What platforms are you going to be developing for?

Jani: Yeah, sure. We have announced Zen Bound 2 is now the thing we are working hard on, and we’re really trying to get it out as close to the release of the iPad as possible. So, Zen Bound 2 is coming out first on the iPad.

Interviewer: And where can people find out more about your game?

Jani: Well, from our website, www.secretexit.com.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.