A few months ago, we secretly began a collaborative project with Facebook that would later be leaked as ‘Project Spartan’. The project’s goal was to develop a mobile platform game that could work inside of a browser and, also, be embedded into the new iPhone and iPad applications from Facebook. The details we were given appeared quite vague but the gist of it was this: Develop a game that runs on mobile browsers.
The tech of choice for developing mobile browser games is called HTML5. A new iteration of an established web page language that allows greater multimedia support but is still relatively untested on mobile devices.
The project began with two people: a Product Manager and a Back-End Engineer. Initially, there were too many constraints and uncertainties. A launch-time of about two months gave us little time to overcome our inexperience with what was possible using HTML5 on mobile devices. Add to this, the fact that, Facebook’s new platform was still being developed and was more of a moving target than a dependable end-state. At this point, the outlook wasn’t very rosy. Being based upon a new technology was packed with challenges and uncertainties regarding the programming of the game. At the time, there were very few HTML 5 mobile games that were more functionally complex than Pong or Tetris. Such a young technology meant that finding experienced engineers in the field proved immensely difficult. In short, it was a high risk, high reward project with a small chance for success. Following one of wooga’s mantras “be fast, be bold,” we gave it a shot.
We created: Magic Land: Island. A medieval city-builder that is based upon an existing wooga title, Magic Land. Early-on we were aware that we wouldn’t be able to include all of the original Magic Land features. Furthermore, we would need to modify the game interface to meet the different usability issues of a touch device. On the engineering side, we got really lucky and struck employee gold. We found Kamil, an engineer that had happened to work on the HTML5 game engine for a few months before we had begun development. He matched our job description perfectly.
It looked like we might have a chance.
Our first prototype exceeded expectations of what, we had thought, was technologically possible. However, turning all of these elements into an actual, fun, and playable game turned out to be a tough nut to crack. But we would not give-up and, so, constantly improved the game. We, amazingly, managed to find more talented individuals to join our team and our productivity increased as product’s quality improved. A postponed release gave us a few more weeks to polish and ended-up working-out in our favor.
On Monday night, we released Magic Land: Island to the public as a part of Facebook’s iPad application launch and their new mobile website. We were incredibly excited about our participation in this event and decided to share the details of our project development process at this month’s Berlin design and front end development meet-up, up.front.ug. Our talk briefly summarized our project from inception to launch.
We think that we’ve created a great game that shines in comparison to other titles on Facebook’s Mobile App Showcase.
There will be a follow-up post about the technology behind the game, so stay tuned.
Sincerely, the Magic Land: Island Team
Florian, Sako, Karin, Horia, Kamil, Jalda, Guillermo, Jo, Boril and Patrick
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