The development and launch of iBlast Moki HD

// April 6th, 2010 // iBlast Moki

Developing for iPad

With the release of the iPad last weekend we really wanted to have iBlast Moki HD ready for the launch. We focused our last 3 weeks of development on making sure we would have a great piece of software for the iPad, and we managed to have it ready for the launch.
Without the real device we were really hoping that the game would be running smoothly on the final hardware and we only had the simulator to try it out. The hard part developing on the simulator is to get a feel of the interaction with the device, you can’t interact with the simulator the same way you interact with the device and can’t really get the space and feeling that the end user will have. The slow performance of the simulator is also another issue, the game was running at a poor 10-15 FPS, making it really hard to test the gameplay. Hopefully we still had the game running on iPhone, so we could test the change we were making to the gameplay or physics simulation on real hardware.
It’s actually funny to think about this, I think that’s probably the first time in the game history that game developers develop and release a game without the hardware and that players start buying before getting their iPad. And what if it was just a joke! 🙂

The day

So here we go, saturday comes, and we are receiving our real iPad. All excited about trying out iBlast Moki HD on the real device, we quickly open the box and synchronize the iPad. After a few minutes into the game we were really happy to see iBlast Moki HD running perfectly at a solid framerate of 30 FPS, the graphics are crisp and sharp on that beautiful iPad screen, and the best part is how everything reacts so well. The interaction with the game is really feeling differently on iPad, having to play on such a big space and doing those large movement with your fingers makes it feel like it’s already the future.

After playing for a while we discovered a few issues especially regarding the wide screen. For example, while you are manipulating items with one finger you can touch the screen with other parts of you hand which would generate multiple touches and this would teleport items. That’s an issue we never saw on iphone because of the small size of the screen, but on iPad it was happening quite often. We just submitted a new update with the fix for it as well as the following other improvements:
– Support for landscape orientation left and right
– Improved some of the graphics
– The physics engine has been optimized and the last 2 levels of mountain land have been tuned to be easier
– The editor layout has been improved to get a better usage of the screen space .

iBlast Moki HD future

The game has not attracted Apple’s marketing power and is currently sitting in the top #50 puzzle. iBlast Moki HD had a good press coverage on TouchArcade, 148 apps, Slidetoplay, Appsmile and even kotaku had an article about it. We have sold a bit less than 100 units since the opening of the ipad appstore but we are hoping for a pickup in sale with the worldwide release and the increase of ipad sales during this year
Even if the sales don’t justify the time spent on the development yet, we are strong believers in the iPad and we are planning on working on future updates of iBlast Moki HD. We think the iPad has a great potential and is bringing new perspective of gameplay that we will be taking advantage of.

If you have and iPad and haven’t tried iBlast Moki HD yet, you can buy it for 4.99$ in the appstore.