Egypt Wizard story

From Ludum Dare to the markets, the result of two months of serious development.

November 21, 2012

3 Min Read

I was fascinated with Eternity Warriors 2 a 2011 Top iPad Free Game ,it is a hack&slash. Then I got that feeling, you know... "I want to make this game", but with more magic and spells, with a simple story and more fun.
Time passes and October 2012 comes, with the warmup for Ludum Dare October challenge claiming for new amazing games..."I must do something", I said to myself, so I started with "Egypt Wizard".

I was a little nervious, bought a few dungeon packs, get some of them for free and the problems beginning, those were hard days of development.

But three days later, I have the character, the scenario and the game skeleton, it was something!, 3 days more and I was testing the game in an iPhone 4S.

The AI of the enemies took me some serious hours of fun to deploy, but finally I got wolves walking, running, hunting me, ahh, that smell of the first steps of the AI. The thing happen next is , as you know , life is hard as game making and I was over charging the scenes with geometry and scripts, I sat back and re-think occlusion algorithms, poly-count and other tedious stuff, and got the game running at 60FPS in devices, but this was only the first stone of the church, 4days have been passsed and I was at my desk, improving my 3D geometry skills, studying new forms of solutions for the same problems that made the game slow, this time I was using ShiVa engine from stonetrip, it differs so much with Unity because of the lack of user comodities, like, mesh compression, asset store with solutions at your hand, the help of the bigger community, etc. Basically you are almost new to hard problems to solve, my desk was full of calculations, and the day after that I made a video playing with the iPad, to have more fun I made a video of the XIXGAMES logo for the game.

2 days after, we are at 12th October, and I realised that the RPG part of the game was very poor, so I decided to add more focus on that part and made some modifications to the character, the levels and the enemies, add 3 more days to this and I declared the first level completed.

I'm lucky, people gift me things like tablets and other devices, this time was an Android tablet (10"), and in 4 days I uploaded a video with the progress of the game, and two days later, I was using meshes and a "level to change levels".

October was about to end, and I need the game to be approved in the markets, my beta tester teams using android, blackberry and ios with testflightapp and so on had been reporting me bugs, ideas and fixes I done. I uploaded the latest screenshots to the Ludum Dare blog, but I knew I was not be able to make accomplishment real... "ç'est la vie".

As soon as I got the game buyed from two people, I published the news, it was 7th November, i felt like my wish made real.

And now, the game is in three markets...