It's not too often a game company opens up and reports on the current state of their studio and responds to any concerns relating to their titles. It's even more rarer for the CEO of the company to take on the duty, so it's a special treat to read a personal post from CEO and founder, Rob Murray, on the Firemint blog doing just that. On the plus side, it gives us a great chance to see some development details on their games.
It's certainly a busy time at Firemint. The Melbourne games studio has been working on frequent updates (a total of 30 updates in just 20 months) and ports for their flagship title, Flight Control. Flight Control is now available on Steam for the Mac and PC. The announcement of Real Racer 2 and the release of the preview trailer has brought on some concerns from eagle eyed fans who were quick to spot a few issues in the preview gameplay footage. This was the perfect opportunity for the Firemint CEO to respond directly to some of those concerns.
In response to the lack of car physics in the gameplay footage, Rob explains why specifically in-game replays do not display the full physics system. The reason being is that physics information is not captured for replays, since replay information has to be transferred and stored on the Firemint servers and for further processing for youtube footage. Considering that there can be millions of replay files, replay files have to be optimised and kept down to a reasonable size. Physics data is a sure way of blowing all that out of the water. There were other issues raised concerning the preview footage, but they can all be explained by the early development stage of the game or details lost due to video compression.
One of the issues that many appstore developers have to face is how to cater to the older generation of iPhone/iPod touch handsets while taking full advantage of the extra speed and capabilities that the newer models offer. Rob describes how Real Racing 2 caters to the various spec handsets out there...
(Rob Murray)... there are two major sets of code and assets within the game, there is one for earlier generations and one for iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4. There are a few combinations that sit in between these two, for example the 3GS uses the iPhone 4 build as a base, and the iPod touch 2 build is based on the 1st generation build but with higher framerates. I cannot adequately express how much work it has been to support these older devices at the same time as a great iPhone 4 build, but simplifying our task and only dealing with one build would have felt like an unacceptable compromise. Everything is stored in one app – if you upgrade your iPhone or iPod touch you will already have everything you need for the retina display.
While Firemint has done an extraordinary job of updating and porting Flight Control to a lot of gaming platforms out there, the issue of whether Firemint are working on any other "new" games has been in the back of many gamers minds. It's an understandable query since Firemint have only released two original games since the launch of Flight Control in March, 2009. Rob has responded that Firemint has always been prototyping new ideas and will only announce titles once they're ready to go full steam ahead with them...
(Rob Murray)...our answer is always yes, we are working on new games and we have been for a long time, but no, we will not tell you what they are! What you probably aren't so aware of is just how many prototypes we have built and discarded or put to the side because they just didn’t feel right yet. We want to create games that mean something, that are fresh and innovate in some key way. When we have a keeper, and when we have gotten it to the stage where it is close to finished and we are really loving it, we will let you know.
Firemint is now at 50 employees, the latest addition to the team is a new Customer Support Coordinator to lead the community effort. The studio has a dedicated team to look after the important aspects of marketing and customer support which has become such a huge part for developers who self-publish their own games. For the full post, head on over to the Firemint blog!