Doodle Blast! - The Idea

Shortly after I released Pop Fizz, I ended up being sick in bed with some flu. As I was lying there, I was thinking that it would be really fun to produce something else. However, at that point I wasn’t ready to invest two more months into something that would just disappear into the app void again. That just seemed like too long of a time to waste. A week, on the other hand, didn’t seem that long. So, the thought occurred to me – what can I crank out in seven days?

I chatted with my brother and we remembered our Sybila Soft days and the game with a tank and an ever-growing stack of guns. Then, just to prove his point, he sent me the following sketch:

I was sold. More importantly, I wanted to play that tank because it looked like fun. So, I was presented with a challenge: how can I turn that picture into a game in seven days or less?

The first thing I did was I cheated. I turned the first day into a weekend to create a simple prototype and test the feasibility of the idea. And that’s where we begin our daily count-down...

Good ol' 80s

The idea for Doodle Blast! has been hatching around for at least two decades. In the 80s, I was growing up in Europe and, back then, Sinclair ZX Spectrum was the pinnacle of home computing as we knew it. It was a pretty cool black box. It came with 48k of RAM (which is less than the size of most icons these days), a built-in BASIC editor and interpreter, whooping 16 colors (only two of which could occupy any 8x8 pixel area), and a jack for a tape recorder that allowed you to store programs on audiotapes as 5mins of screechy noise. In short, it was daBomb! The best parts about it were that coding it was rather simple and that an independent person could sit down and create something that maxed out the capabilities of the machine. In short, it wasn’t very different from the iPhone today.

Back then, my brother and two of our friends decided to form a “company” (and I use that term very loosely) called Sybila Soft to write games for the Spectrum and distribute it to our friends. Friend-to-friend distribution was the modus operandi of the time and we were often surprised ourselves at how far our games travelled. The best part is that those games are still alive and floating around the Internet today, ready to be downloaded and replayed in some java-based Sinclair emulator running as a widget on your desktop.

Anyway, that was the first time we came up with the idea of a tank with an ever-growing tower of more and more obscure guns. However, we grew up out of our teens, moved on with our lives, and the idea never came to fruition.

The Making of Doodle Blast!

It’s two days after I published Doodle Blast! on iTunes. Originally, I thought about writing a day-to-day blog as I was writing the app, chronicling the process and some of the decisions that went into making it. However, what ended up happening is that I spent most of my time cranking out code, having little time for anything else. So, now that I have some time on my hands, I’m going to write a little post-mortem blog instead. I have saved daily snapshots of the code base, so I can re-create the progress and share it here with you.

Now, I’m not much of a blogger, so if I’m going too slow, too fast, or too dull, lemme know. I’m open to suggestions.