My story of The Incident

I’m here to tell you a little more about The Incident. Chances are you know what it is, gentle blog reader. In case you don’t: it’s an iPhone/iPod/iPad game by Matt Comi and yours truly. You can get it here.

It started four years ago, when the first iPhone launched. That’s when I met Matt, a fellow developer/designer with dreams of making iPhone apps before there was such a thing as the iPhone SDK. Over the next few years, Matt released two of his apps (TV Forecast and Pocketball) and I helped design several others.

Game development is fun. Matt learned this with Pocketball, and he was itching to keep going. So one day he asked me: hey, how would you like to make graphics for a game? The pitch: you’re a platformer-type guy stuck in a Tetris-type world where everyday stuff is falling and you have to dodge it. "I just want to be able to dodge a bathtub, that’s all I’m saying.“ It would be pixel-graphicky, appealing to our twelve-year old selves.

After agreeing on this much, Matt and I went on our respective holidays. This gave us a chance to do some work in isolation and impress each other with solid chunks of work later. (We would then re-use this work-apart technique throughout the whole process, out of sheer necessity, and to great effect!) Matt came back with an engine which piled on objects, and I had a stack of random object drawings and this shaky mockup:

This was drawn on a MacBook Air, in bed. So were the first few dozen falling objects. I believe this was the first set I made.

Starting very square there. I wasn’t yet sure how we’d do irregular shapes. Looking at these items now, I can see some things I’d change, but I don’t think I will. History and all that. These were a bit tricky at first - we had to consider the minimum and maximum size of objects that wouldn’t be too difficult to avoid, their polygonal complexity, and whether it would make sense for them to pile on. My mantra became "somewhere between the size of a breadbox and a car.” And I’d like to address one long-standing controversy: yes, the falling pillow can hurt you. It’s falling from very high! It’s probably hot from re-entry!

Matt’s idea for the game’s hero, Frank Solway, was to make him a really boring everyman, with a touch of desperation and manic energy. I pitched this to my brother Vanja Mrgan, a pretty great concept artist. My pitch described Frank as “George Clooney meets Shaun of The Dead.” In my head, he sounds like David Strathairn in Limbo (which is awesome.)

Frank has a bit of that 2000s-gaming cliche going, with the white shirt and red tie and stubble. But I think his expressions and mannerisms make him distinct enough. In any case, The Incident 1.0 is just the start - who knows where he might go next.

You can see some random screenshots I posted to Dribble during development. The entire idea of low-level blogging the process was inspired by Shaun Inman’s amazingly candid and truly humbling Mimeoverse blog.

I don’t have any super-secret tools or setup tips. You probably know about all these, but here they are, the things that helped me make my parts of the game:

  • Dropbox - Everything lives here. It’s crucial.
  • Photoshop - This is the only drawing tool I use.
  • MobyGames.com - A great resource for classic game screenshots.
  • The Animator’s Survival Kit - The best introduction to and reference for animation.
  • 24" iMac
  • Coda - The website was made in it, naturally. I also use it to edit our XML files.

And then Monday night came, and with it, our approval email. Then Tuesday, and our official release. And you know what? We could not be happier with the way the launch went. Up until the very last second, we had no clue if there would even be any significant response to speak of. But pretty much anyone we can think of has covered the game in some way, and the emails and tweets we’ve received have been super-positive. Our approach to marketing is fairly hands-off (and our budget is a comfortable zero dollars); we were hoping the game would generate buzz by word of mouth and letter of blog, and that certainly seems to have happened. Again, it’s been really really great, and we thank everyone who took the time to blog, link, review, or just say “nice job!”

Matt and I knew that music was a super-important component. It had to be memorable and it had to be appropriately 8-bitty. That’s not easy! We contacted a few big names of the chiptune scene, and as the game wrapped up, we became a bit anxious - with no soundtrack in sight, and not even a strong commitment from any artist, it was starting to look like we’d be shipping a music-free 1.0. We could’ve lived with that, but luckily we didn’t have to.

Out of nowhere, a

Music by Cabel Sasser