This week is Unity’s Unite conference in San Francisco and Brian will be speaking there on a couple topics. First up on Wednesday at 2:45 Brian is going to be part of the “Making Money on iPhone” panel. Hopefully this will be a good panel to provide real information and advice to developers looking to get into iPhone development. It definitely won’t be a fluffy talk about how easy it is to succeed!

On a more practical level Brian will be presenting “Get your Cocoa On” on Friday at 1:30. This is going to be a very technical talk covering ways to integrate Cocoa development into a Unity game development pipeline. This is extremely important for any developers that want to take advantage of various libraries and things that the iPhone offers, which aren’t natively supported within Unity.

If you’re going to be in San Francisco this week, let us know and we’d love to meet up.

It’s hard to believe that the iPhone Game Jam was less than 3 weeks ago. Things have come a long way for Gravity Sling since that first 12 hours of furious overnight coding. When we finished that night we had the core gameplay down fairly well, with a very rough OpenFeint integration, and some pretty graphics but that’s about it.

Now we have a complete game. The physics have been reworked so gameplay is a lot more fun, we’ve created a total of 45 levels to play through, added an awesome soundtrack and swapped out nearly every graphic in the game. We’ve also decided to release Gravity Sling for free and hope that enough people will enjoy it that the sales of the In-App purchase level editor will be worthwhile.

While some would say this is the end, that’s not true for us. We have lots of plans for what the future holds. We definitely want to polish up the level editor so anyone can make their own levels. We also think we have a way to enable moving planets and obstacles, which will add a huge amount of life and challenge to the game. Of course, all this is in addition to more levels!

There’s no way to know the exact timing for release, but we submitted it to Apple last night, and our best guess is that it will take a couple weeks to get approved. Follow @riptidegames on Twitter, or check back here often to keep up to date on the progress and to be the first to know once it’s approved.

In the meantime, here’s a reverse-order screenshot timeline of Gravity Sling development for you.

A great run on the Crazy Face level

How things looked on October 7th

Gravity Slingshot at the end of the iPhone Game Jame - just 12 hours of development

We were doing a final push to submit Gravity Sling to the App Store today when we got word of a change in policy for In App purchases from Apple, which we think is great news! We are very happy to announce that when it is released Gravity Sling will be available as a free app from the App Store. Some initial set of levels (we’re thinking around 10-15) will be included for free, with the remaining available as an in-app purchase.

This is great, because it means everyone will be able to try out the gameplay, and see what Gravity Sling is all about without having to spend a penny. Those of you that love it (which we hope is all of you!) will then be able to support us by purchasing the additional level pack and enabling us to continue development on new levels and features.

We’d love to know what you think, but we definitely think this is going to be a win-win for everyone!

Also as an added treat I though you’d enjoy seeing a screenshot of my Million point run on the “Big and Little” level

We’re just a bit behind on getting Gravity Sling submitted to the app store, but things are definitely getting close. Check out the trailer we put together, and keep checking back to follow our progress.

Since the iPhone Game Jam wrapped up we’ve been hard at work finishing up our game Gravity Sling. We’ve made a huge amount of progress, having reworked the underlying physics engine, most of the graphics added proper UI, and picked up an awesome sound track.

The team has grown a bit adding Ben Long from Noise Buffet who’s doing all the audio, and Seth Howard who is helping with some game design, and porting the game to Palm Pre.

That’s right, you heard it here first – not only will Gravity Sling be available for the iPhone, but it will also be available shortly for the Palm Pre! We’re super excited about this, and can’t wait to see what Palm owners think of the game too.

More updates are coming, but for now here’s a couple quick screenshots from one of the levels we took yesterday.

Tuesday night, Brian Robbins teamed up with Jonathan Hartstein of Pyromonkey Productions and Eric Lannan of Crucial Games to participate in the iPhone Game Jam at 360iDev. We got started around 7pm, and stopped working on our game Gravity Sling around 7am. It was a fun night, where we met some really cool people, saw some great things being built, and learned a lot about how to get something done incredibly fast.

I used to pride myself on being able to develop games very quickly and just focus on getting things done. In fact at my first job at CleverMedia we would release a game every Thursday, and occasionally spend just a single day getting the game done. The focus there was to build a game, get it up and move on to the next one. However it’s been several years since I’ve tried to do something that fast, and it was definitely a challenge to get back into the mindset.

What went right?

Team comfort Eric, Jonathan and I have all worked together at our previous job, and know what each other brings to the table, and we know how each other works. We certainly weren’t like Team Phobic with their full team of 7 there, but we didn’t have to spend any time getting to know one another or anything like that, and this made a big difference.

Subversion A few hours before this started I setup a local SVN server on my laptop that we could use that night. The Internet connection was a bit flaky and I wanted to have an easy way to share our code with each other. This worked out brilliantly as the 3 of us were working. We only had a couple minor conflicts through the night, and those were very quickly resolved. Without SVN setup we probably would have wasted a couple hours through the night trying to integrate code, and keep everyone on the same page.

Having an idea We started off the night with 3 ideas we thought about building but almost immediately decided on Gravity Sling and never looked back. We just focused on that, and tried to see how far we could take it.

Splitting up Responsibilities Almost immediately we determined who would be working on what parts of the project, and we generally stuck to that as we went. Eric did the art, Jonathan did the core physics and I wrote all the framework and interface stuff. This kept us each focused on our specific areas, and we could see how everything was coming along, even when we couldn’t integrate everything together. I was a bit worried at 3am when everything was still very separate pieces, but once things started to come together around 4am they came together very quickly.

What didn’t go right?

Honestly, not much given the timeframe, and goals. We had hoped to have a game complete enough to submit to Apple at the end of the night, and we didn’t quite get there so I guess that’s what didn’t go right. We did get to a point of having a very solid initial prototype of gameplay, and just need to finish it up before we can submit to Apple.

What’s next?

We’ve talked about it and we all want to finish this up, so we’re going to tweak Gravity Sling a bit, build out some more levels, and put some additional polish into the overall experience, and then we’ll get it submitted to Apple so the whole world can see the final result.

Wrapping Up

The feedback and response on Twitter has been great. Dan Grigsby at Mobile Orchard covered the event as we were getting started (and took 3 hours to get it posted thanks to the poor hotel Internet). Peter Bakhirev at Byteclub posted about how to survive a Game Jam event and it looks like Mac Most and Touch Arcade will be covering the results in some way too.

You can check out all of the Projects on the iPhone Game Jam site too.

Thanks to Noel Llopis of Snappy Touch for getting this organized, and John and Tom hosts of 360iDev for letting us do this!

Overall it was a lot of fun, and I’m definitely looking forward to the next one!