Get Out
Get Out!! - App Store Link
Trailer
Screenshots
Hi,
Finally realised my game on the App Store. Wanted to take the chance to tell you the background of how it came about.
This is my first app and it is based on a concept I came up with a few years ago. I had this idea of creating a game where the character is trying to get out of a room. Each room has multiple doors and the player needs to choose the right door to proceed otherwise it is game over. There was only one route to completing the game (the door choice wasn’t random) so the player would need to remember the doors they chose the last time they played. I wanted it to be a really challenging game which is why the character only had one life.
I grew up in the era of the Super Nintendo and I really wanted to bring back the nostalgia I had for retro style graphics, audio and challenging gameplay. Everyone remembers the the visuals and audio of the old style nintendo games. As much as I love the ground breaking visuals of today , I don’t get the same feeling I used to get when i would load up a Super Nintendo and hear the capcom noise when loading street fighter.
I designed the concept in powerpoint and had planned to learn swift but I never got around to it. This was around 2015…..
Fast forward to May 2020. Being in lockdown has meant we have all had more time. I started getting a lot of tasks done around the house that needed doing. Anyway one of the tasks involved moving all my documents from an old hard drive onto my laptop. I ended up looking through the old hard drive and finding the powerpoint presentation which had the concept of the game I designed 5 years ago!
I had completely forgot that I had designed this game. While looking through the slides, I was getting the feeling that while such a simple concept, people would play this game if I built it!
With a baby due in august (due yesterday to be precise!) I decided to myself that I would finally learn swift, build this game and launch it on the App Store before the baby gets here. It wasn’t about making money, or starting a new career in app development, it was just about following through with an idea I had a few years back and proving to myself I could do it.
I spent a month or so learning swift and then when I felt sufficient enough, I started to code the game in spritkit. I coded it programmatically rather than using the scene editor functionally as taking this approach would mean I would constantly be getting practice coding in swift.
I designed all the sprites from scratch (with no prior experience) and I have to say, the first time I saw the character animate was a big moment for me. It mean I knew I could follow through with this!
The basis of the game is the same but there are few things that have changed along the way.While building the game, I would send videos of it to my mates to get their opinions. One of them mentioned that restarting from the beginning after choosing the wrong door every time was too. hard and with only a 1 in 3 chance of choosing the right door, players might get annoyed. I felt like this was good feed back so I gave the character 3 lives.
After a few levels of choosing the right door, I felt the game became a bit to repetitive so I designed levels with spikes, invisible spikes, monsters, 6 doors and secret switches. I think this had made the game much more repayable and really challenging!
Another thing one of my friends mentioned is that they wanted hints on which doors to choose and would like to be able to continue. I was really against this idea, as I wanted this game to be really hard like the old school games. They didn’t have hints but some games did have continues.
I decided that the best thing to do was to offer these as in app purchases. I think by doing this, certain players have the option to buy extra lives and door hints but it doesn’t sacrifice the gameplay for those who want the challenge of being able to complete the game without.
I launched the game on the App Store on the 15th of august and I have to say I am so happy to have achieved this.
It may seem small to others but I think to have designed all the graphics, created all the audio, learnt swift, coded the app, launched on the App Store, all ahead of the baby being born feels like a massive achievement. I can honestly say to myself I have doesn’t something positive, with all the negativity going on in the old.
I would love for more people to experience my game. I think it brings back that old school feeling you had when playing old games in either the arcade or on a home console and because it is so hard, I really want to see if someone is able to complete it!
Get Out!! - App Store Link
Trailer
Screenshots
Hi,
Finally realised my game on the App Store. Wanted to take the chance to tell you the background of how it came about.
This is my first app and it is based on a concept I came up with a few years ago. I had this idea of creating a game where the character is trying to get out of a room. Each room has multiple doors and the player needs to choose the right door to proceed otherwise it is game over. There was only one route to completing the game (the door choice wasn’t random) so the player would need to remember the doors they chose the last time they played. I wanted it to be a really challenging game which is why the character only had one life.
I grew up in the era of the Super Nintendo and I really wanted to bring back the nostalgia I had for retro style graphics, audio and challenging gameplay. Everyone remembers the the visuals and audio of the old style nintendo games. As much as I love the ground breaking visuals of today , I don’t get the same feeling I used to get when i would load up a Super Nintendo and hear the capcom noise when loading street fighter.
I designed the concept in powerpoint and had planned to learn swift but I never got around to it. This was around 2015…..
Fast forward to May 2020. Being in lockdown has meant we have all had more time. I started getting a lot of tasks done around the house that needed doing. Anyway one of the tasks involved moving all my documents from an old hard drive onto my laptop. I ended up looking through the old hard drive and finding the powerpoint presentation which had the concept of the game I designed 5 years ago!
I had completely forgot that I had designed this game. While looking through the slides, I was getting the feeling that while such a simple concept, people would play this game if I built it!
With a baby due in august (due yesterday to be precise!) I decided to myself that I would finally learn swift, build this game and launch it on the App Store before the baby gets here. It wasn’t about making money, or starting a new career in app development, it was just about following through with an idea I had a few years back and proving to myself I could do it.
I spent a month or so learning swift and then when I felt sufficient enough, I started to code the game in spritkit. I coded it programmatically rather than using the scene editor functionally as taking this approach would mean I would constantly be getting practice coding in swift.
I designed all the sprites from scratch (with no prior experience) and I have to say, the first time I saw the character animate was a big moment for me. It mean I knew I could follow through with this!
The basis of the game is the same but there are few things that have changed along the way.While building the game, I would send videos of it to my mates to get their opinions. One of them mentioned that restarting from the beginning after choosing the wrong door every time was too. hard and with only a 1 in 3 chance of choosing the right door, players might get annoyed. I felt like this was good feed back so I gave the character 3 lives.
After a few levels of choosing the right door, I felt the game became a bit to repetitive so I designed levels with spikes, invisible spikes, monsters, 6 doors and secret switches. I think this had made the game much more repayable and really challenging!
Another thing one of my friends mentioned is that they wanted hints on which doors to choose and would like to be able to continue. I was really against this idea, as I wanted this game to be really hard like the old school games. They didn’t have hints but some games did have continues.
I decided that the best thing to do was to offer these as in app purchases. I think by doing this, certain players have the option to buy extra lives and door hints but it doesn’t sacrifice the gameplay for those who want the challenge of being able to complete the game without.
I launched the game on the App Store on the 15th of august and I have to say I am so happy to have achieved this.
It may seem small to others but I think to have designed all the graphics, created all the audio, learnt swift, coded the app, launched on the App Store, all ahead of the baby being born feels like a massive achievement. I can honestly say to myself I have doesn’t something positive, with all the negativity going on in the old.
I would love for more people to experience my game. I think it brings back that old school feeling you had when playing old games in either the arcade or on a home console and because it is so hard, I really want to see if someone is able to complete it!
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