Sometime around 2003, a small startup called HPT-Interactive was formed. The founding members included my brother Matt, and two friends of his, Eric and Dave. As far as I can remember, the group released two game titles to the Windows Mobile Pocket PC market that was around at the time. The first was the HPT Game Pack that included renditions of Break Out, Space Invaders, and Asteroids. The more notable second title was a little gem known as Blade of Betrayal. As my brother Matt has put it, the team originally wanted to make a “run, jump, and gather coins” game. However, as time passed, the project ballooned into a full-on platform game featuring a comic book style story line, various zones, enemy types, etc. In order to make a game like this possible, another friend of mine was brought in to help out, Billy. Billy is a fantastic artist with a natural born talent for game design, so he worked with the team to flesh out story lines, provide artwork, etc.
Blade of Betrayal was released later that year and was very well received by the Pocket PC community. You can still find some of the original reviews online. I’ve provided some original screenshots of the Pocket PC edition of Blade of Betrayal below.
Unfortunately, though Blade of Betrayal was well received, it did not perform financially very well. Due to this, the team eventually broke apart as its members began to focus more on their professional careers. Eric and Billy stuck with it though, and began working on a version of Blade of Betrayal for the ill-fated Tapwave Zodiac. Yet again, another unfortunate event occurred, Tapwave went under during the development of the port. If you are unfamiliar with the Tapwave Zodiac, it’s quite understandable since it wasn’t around very long at all. You can, of course, read more about it on Wikipedia. I’ve actually got Eric’s old Tapwave Zodiac, and occasionally power it up for amusement.
For several more years, the source code to Blade of Betrayal sat lifeless on a hard-drive in Eric’s apartment. In fact, at one point, he’d even believed he’d lost the original source code. During this time period, being the brother of one of the original developers at HPT-Interactive, I actually sparked up a friendship with Eric and we’d been toying with the idea of developing a new game. Eric, always an engine programmer, would provide me with source code to whatever his latest game engine was he was working on and I’d devise some sort of simple concept for a game. We never really worked on anything big. In late 2008, that all changed for us though.
It was Winter 2008, in Houston, Texas and various friends of mine were in from out of town. We’d all decided to meet up at the Flying Saucer in downtown. After spending some time hanging out with friends and having a few drinks, an old friend of mine arrived, Billy Garretsen. Billy and I go way back. As far back as Middle School I can remember tossing around game ideas and concepts with him, but never really creating anything. Well, Billy and I got to talking, and of course, yet again, we were throwing around more game concepts. I’d mentioned that I was spinning up various projects with Eric, and this really perked Billy’s interest since they hadn’t seen each other in a while. Eventually, we came to the topic of the iPhone, and how a brand new SDK had just been released allowing developers to write native applications for the device. We thought, “What could be the quickest turn around on a game for the iPhone that we could put out?” Of course – the consensus was, Blade of Betrayal.
As soon as I got home I contacted Eric and asked him how plausible he thought the idea was, and told him to find the source code. It didn’t take much for us to reach the same mindset – after all, developers were releasing apps like crazy for the iPhone and were all getting rich, so we thought we’d give it a shot.
Now, the ironic part about all of this is that I’d been a Mac hater for years. It didn’t take much for me to start spouting off non-sense about how this or that sucked on the Mac. Yet – I found myself in an Apple Store with Eric purchasing a Macbook and was eating my own words. After working with the computer for the past 3+ years, I’ve come to terms that it is actually a darn good machine with a darn good OS. This experience has taught me to look at both the good and the bad of all devices and operating systems. Now this doesn’t mean I accept the culture that comes along with owning a Mac and frequenting the Apple Store. I found it quite ridiculous after I purchased my Macbook and was waiting for Eric when one of the Apple Store employees did the double finger point at my Macbook and said, “You know what’s awesome? That’s awesome!” *sigh*
In fact, I find the so-called culture created by Microsoft, Apple, the Linux community, etc, etc all friggin ridiculous. Microsoft is a nerd trying much too hard to be cool, this resulted in one of the creepiest parties I’ve ever been too. Linux claims they have great community support, and when you ask for it they treat you like the scum of the earth. That being said, this is a rant for another day… 😉
Moving on, what was I talking about? Oh! Blade of Betrayal. So once Eric and I purchased our Macs, we began learning the tools and the language, XCode and Objective-C. Coming from Visual Studio, we honestly found them to be a bit weak, but we eventually developed a love-hate relationship that has worked out for the best (These days, I actually quite enjoy the flexibility of Objective-C).
Now, the outstanding thing about writing games and software for the iPhone is that you can actually write the majority of your code in C or C++. This was great news for us, because Blade of Betrayal was written entirely in C and C++ code. Our first major hurdle was to move all of the code into an XCode project containing a simple Objective-C layer, and fix all the compiler and linker errors. This surprisingly took less time than I expected as I think we had something displaying on the screen in about a week or two.
One of the more amusing aspects of porting Blade of Betrayal to the iPhone was our tooling. The original Pocket PC tools had been written in Borland Builder around 2003. We encountered a problem with our images where they needed to be sized in powers of two to work with OpenGL ES on the iPhone. Now I didn’t really know anything about Borland Builder, but I did know C#. So I began porting a lot of the Borland Builder code over to C# so I could write additional code to make our images powers of two. This eventually resulted in a hybrid mess of half-assed poorly written and maintained tools. Trust me, you don’t know what unintuitive is until you’ve encountered these tools. Amazingly though, we continued using them through games like Bumble Tales, and Headstone Harry. The tools may be aweful, but they do work.
So anyways, as the weeks went by, our code began coming more and more together. We eventually pulled a few all-nighter weekends at Billy’s place. Then, some how, after three months of work, the game was done. We proudly submitted it to the app store, and waited for the millions of dollars to start rolling in.
Unfortunately though, things just don’t work that way. 😉
Blade of Betrayal was only moderately successful, if you could consider it as that. It was nice to be able to afford iPads when they originally came out, and a few other things, all on money our game had earned. Unfortunately, the millions of dollars are only reserved for the lucky few who make a hit out of an extremely original idea. I am proud to have worked on it though, it was a three month project I put my heart and soul into with two very good friends.
If you are interesting in checking it out, Blade of Betrayal is available for iOS and Android devices.
Check it out on iTunes or the Android App Store.
Robert's Programming Blog 