Tinkerbox

After my indie game developer attempt didn’t pan out, I spent a few years doing independent contract programming. This work had its down sides, but overall it was a good time, and I got to work on a lot of interesting projects. One of the most memorable projects was for Subatomic Studios, who was/is famous for the early iOS smash hit tower defense game, Fieldrunners. But I didn’t work on Fieldrunners - instead I was on another project they were creating for Autodesk, that eventually became known as Autodesk Tinkerbox.

Autodesk Tinkerbox is a Rube Goldberg inspired game and toybox app that lets you create physics based contraptions and solve puzzles in the style of the famous Rube Goldberg comics. It was developed on PC and released for iPhone and iPad.

For this project, most of my work was on the UI/UX, menus, and motion graphics - all of which is typically pretty straight forward work, and often relegated to junior developers. But this was really interesting stuff, and was complicated by having to implement for the multi-touch interface. So, this meant home-grown implementations of tear-away icons (taking things out of a tray), velocity scrolling, pinch zoom, and state detection and management between the many varieties of modality the design called for. For its complexity it would have been easy to implement this poorly, with many broken edge cases and outright bugs, but the final product was rock solid in the end, and I’m quite happy with it.

Also fun, was the motion graphics side of it all. We didn’t have an artist dictating the motion graphics for us, so I sorta just did it myself and all in code. So all the fades in/out, slides in/out, fanfare animations, etc were designed and implemented programatically by yours truly (all highly informed by the awesome art by Randis, to be sure)! It’s hard to appreciate the snappiness and robustness of it all from YouTube videos, but sadly I don’t have any direct captures of my own! Anyway, I hope some of the shine comes through:

When the game came out, it did well for its category. Quite well actually. For a short time at least it was the second most popular free download in the app store, ahead of even Angry Birds (which…if you were a phone user at that time, you know what an accomplishment that is!). If not for Pac-man Battle Royale, we would have been number 1!

Does success make for good friendships, or do good friendships make for success? I don’t know, but I’ll say that another bonus out of this project was the lasting connections and friendships I made with the folks who worked with on this game with me. Randis I mentioned, but I’m also happy and thankful to have had friendships created or strengthened with Christian B (Lead Designer), Jim B (Graphics and Physics engineer), and Ash M (Lead Producer), in doing this work.

All in all, it was a good project made by good people, and though it was a fast development and had an ultimately fleeting existence, it remains among my favorite video game making experiences to date.