2 Games 1 Month: The story of a Corona convertee

Posted by Hetal

Bay Area game studio Yobonja are releasing two games today: A massively updated version of their App of the Week winner Blast Monkeys and a brand new one called Tap Party 2.

Below, designer Stepan Shurygin of the Retro Ink Graphic Design Company talks about how he worked on both games with the Yobonja guys and subsequently was exposed to “this new SDK” called Corona, and details how they ended up putting both games together in a month. From the looks of it, it looks like Step and the Yobonja guys will be sticking with Corona since “we simply couldn’t afford to spend months on a single project when we could rebuild and put together several new games in the same time frame.”

You can get both, Blast Monkeys and Tap Party 2, at the App Store here and here.

Stepan Shurygin, Retro Ink Graphic Design Company

My name is Stepan I was first hired by Yobonja in June 2010 to design the user interface and 2D graphics on Tap Party and, more recently, Tap Party 2. Since then, we have completed that first version of Tap Party and updated the iPad build several times.

A couple months back, Angelo created Blast Monkeys during a R&D session investigating the Corona SDK. This new game was quickly built to a shippable state and released on Apple’s App Store, where it was very well received. The fast development time and easy learning curve of this new SDK showed us that it was an ideal candidate for future Yobonja projects. We had strongly considered attempting a universal build of the first Tap Party across several mobile Apple and Android devices, but ultimately tabled it due to development time estimates. (hehe!)

I was very excited when Tobiah called me from Silicon Valley to announce in a frenzied voice that Tap Party 2 was greenlighted for an entire Corona rebuild, and that he was driving down to Los Angeles to sleep on my floor and put it together — which we mostly did in a single week! Corona has so many speed improvements in it from our previous engine that much of the code we were attempting to implement in our games became smaller, faster, easier, and even — to my surprise — interchangeable across platforms! Those are the kinds of differences that count. With all the time we saved using Corona, we completely finished Tap Party 2 in three weeks.

Working on Tap Party 1 up until the March re-build had been tedious to say the least. Tobiah was using the free open source Cocos2D engine for the project. While it gave us access to all of the source code and complete control over resolving any issue we had, implementing almost every new component took days or even weeks. Working alongside Tobiah all day during crunchweek on Tap Party 2, I saw just how much faster Corona really is. Every couple minutes, I could pass along a UI or art change, and he could quickly jump between coding and the Corona open simulator (for any of our target devices!) and show me the changes and what the visual modifications looked like. There were so many times during our Tap Party 2 crunch that Tobiah dreaded implementing something that his experience told him would take forever, only to discover that in Corona he could do it in about 30 minutes. Literally!

Implementing final art assets went quite smoothly with the combination of Corona, Dropbox, and a Google Spreadsheets asset list. Two or three times during our crunch, we realized that there was something in the Blast Monkeys code that we could use for Tap – so we simply copied and pasted it into our code. One of the major challenges for us was to make a universal build that could deal with different screen resolutions. We were able to quickly setup a reliable pipeline using Corona’s thorough documentation. I made a title safe region in Photoshop for UI elements for standard and HD assets, and Tobiah set up Corona to auto-crop the backgrounds for each respective device.

In less than one month, Yobonja was able to not only able to create Tap Party 2 but also build a massive update to Blast Monkeys, including a new premium version with 90 levels. This shows why we chose to rebuild Tap Party in Corona — because we simply couldn’t afford to spend months on a single project when we could rebuild and put together several new games in the same time frame. Corona not only saves you time, it allows you to spend that time having more fun and being more productive.