We are super excited to announce that Zen Balance for iOS will be released this Friday, November 27, in the App Store!!!
(If you don’t know what Zen Balance is you can read more about it in our official announcement post here, and you can read our previous development blog posts about the game here)
So, to kick off our count down to release, today's blog post will be about the development process that went into Zen Balance. Looking back on all the work we did for this game, the one thing that stands out the most is the development environment we used. Zen Balance is the first game we've developed using Unity3D. Before we even had the basic idea for Zen Balance we knew that we wanted to start developing in Unity because of its ability to allow us to make more robust games, but we weren't quite sure where to start. We needed a project that we could feasibly accomplish in a shorter amount of time, but also something that would show us around Unity and give us a good introduction to the software. Zen Balance turned out to be the perfect introductory project for us. There wasn't a whole lot of difficult programming or in-depth class building that went into this game. With block'd! we had had to build a ton of classes and methods that ran mostly in the background, but with Zen Balance most of the code translates directly to action on the screen. With this game we were able to spend less time worrying about making our code work and more time just figuring out how to simply make a game in Unity. Most of the issues we ran into during development had to do with figuring out how to accomplish a task in Unity (ignoring the issues we had with code signing and provisioning profiles, but that’s a whole other story). So, for the most part, the development of this game was really us learning a new environment, and less actual code development; but again, that was kind of the point. We knew we were going to want to make larger games in the future and we would need a stronger platform to do so, but we didn't really want to jump into a large scale game with a completely new development environment. Zen Balance turned out to be the prefect learning tool for us, giving us a good hands on tutorial of Unity and allowing us to feel comfortable tackling a larger game project in Unity further down the road (hint hint).
For the sake of keeping the post short there’s really not much more to say. Honestly, this game was more of a hands on introduction to Unity for us, so there’s not a whole lot of interesting coding that went into the game. But none the less, we are still thrilled with the game and can’t wait for you guys to play it!
Tomorrow we will be talking about the art that went into Zen Balance, which is actually a little more of an interesting topic so be sure to check back for that. And of course, don’t forget to download Zen Balance when it comes out this Friday!!
As always, thanks for reading,
-Matt.