07 Apr Random coolness from the past two weeks

In the development of Jimmy Pataya, a lot of things were new to us. And I noticed several things:

iPod v1 > iPhone 3G

When ever you develop for a platform, you need to work within it’s limitations and specifications. For both the iPod and iPhone these specs can be easily found. Whenever you read them, you think: “Ey, iPod has less Mhz than the iPhone, so it must be slower.” Wrong! We actually had to put a lot of effort in making Jimmy Pataya run smoothly on the iPhone. The main problem is that there are several background processes while running the game. The iPhone obviously checks for incoming calls, but also runs other stuff like the 3G connection and email.

Unity..

.. just keeps amazing me every time.
This time it was with music and sound effects. It. Just. Works.
In Jimmy Pataya it makes no difference whether you are listening to your own music or not. Whenever you play your own music, Unity knows it and it disables the game’s background music. But, it doesn’t disable the game sound effects! If you want no sounds, you can just hit our mute button. This cool because we didn’t write a single line of code for it and now you only have to have one mute button, which works for both music and sound.

Hidden Talents

Speaking of music and sound effects, Paladin has the most well-hidden skills team ever! 🙂 I have been working at Paladin for about 3 years and only just now some team members revealed their unique skills.

Derk, normally CEO, and usually busy running the company, has made a great and very addicting soundtrack.
Dylan, normally sales guy and also busy running the company, did some great voice acting. Starting the game with a “Here we GOOO!” shout makes me smile over and over again. Next time he will do Keanu Reeves.

I asure you, you’ll love both the music and voice overs.

I should not forget to mention our team member Tijmen, normally our web dude. It was his first project doing 100% Unity and was responsible for atleast 50% of the programming. He did a great job!

(although he was scratching his chin quite often)

Our two interns also did a great job while there was the big time pressure. Didn’t bother them really as they made a fantastic gui, character and in-game art assets.

Last but not least is Niels, who was the project leader which wasn’t easy considering the time we had and all the choices we had to make.

Oh and lets not forget about me, I have never done any blogging in my life and here I am writing several posts about Jimmy Pataya 😉

Attention!

Something very different, but also way too cool, was all the (media) attention! A dutch game dev magazine featured us two times on their website, Dutch Game Garden wants us to give a presention about Jimmy Pataya on the INDIGO festival and if all goes well we will be featured on several iPod and iPhone game websites. Then there are all the people dropping by at our office or sending us messages on Twitter. Like Boris would say: “It’s nice!”