![:P](http://public.gamedev.net/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tongue.gif)
This was largely a two-man team project, one bloke worked on the artwork, I did the game code. Took two years to complete! (My first too.) We recruited couple of other people to help us with specific parts of the game; one talented programmer for iOS and menu programming, a 3D artist to do our car models, another artist for menu background paintings, and plus another to help us with concept artwork. Hard work, but lots of fun!
The screen shots highlight the different race tracks, and in some of them you can actually see the bonus items/halos around the player's car. Also included are shots of the menu system. The menus are simple to navigate; we deliberately aimed for the keep-it-simple principle. We wanted to get game play happening in just 2 menu clicks.
The enemy cars use a ray-casting AI system, they are somewhat self-organising and are completely autonomous from each other. Which means we are not using the traditional raceline method to tug them around the race track. This created some challenging problems in getting the cars behave, but eventually I got that sorted.
The game took much longer to finish then we anticipated, and we had some setbacks along the way, such as getting artwork completed in time, or going through uncharted territory on the technical side of things.
Couple of lessons/tips:
* Make sure you have solid idea what you want in the game very early in the project. This avoids big coding tear-downs halfway though the project. We did ok in that respect.
* Use existing tools for editing assets, don't bother making your own (if you are small team).
* Research research research. See what others are doing in the same gaming genre.
* Get other people to test your game while you are developing it. They can give you very useful tips along the way.
We are planning to release the game on Monday via the app store. For more info, check here:
http://bjango.com/ipad/sideways/
Click here to view the iotd