It only took us about an hour and half, which was pretty quick. Although the game is relatively small and only really has a 5 or 6 different views to be built and designed, its all the complex behind the scenes stuff that is going to be a bitch a bit tricky.

Having looked through the iPhone documentation today, establishing network connections and reading the users location on a consistent basis and then relaying that to the server is going to be where the problems are going to crop up. Oh and I forgot to mention creating a compass using latitudes and longitudes requires some serious maths, beyond my level of knowledge at least. In fact pushing myself to learn more seems to be the theme at the moment considering neither me nor Kseniya have actually touched Objective-C before and here we are build an app for the iPhone using Objective-C. Given the technologies I have just talked about we are setting the bar pretty high also.

I have to confess that without the help of a certain website. I think the road to iPhone development requires a lot of Objective-C experience and I think Apple knows this and intends to leave it this way. You see I think Apple likes the fact that there is a certain exclusivity on the iTunes App Store. I’m not saying this is a bad thing I mean now I am getting to grips with it, it just makes it more appealing for me to create quality apps because the competition is relatively small at the moment. Plus the cost of distribution is nothing.

There was an early idea in the pot already conceived by me and Airs but we had already ruled that out for being too hard to build. Airs had come up with another, which was basically murder mystery for the iPhone using location based clues. This was ok, but it lacked gameplay mechanic and the crucial hook. That drive that keeps making you play more and more. Plus I had another idea, which I thought was better. And commence ye-old vintage Gav vs Airs battle.

My idea was to change the way we purchase and play games using the internet as the glue to stick platform together. Basically imagine WOW (Word of Warcraft) on a Mac, iPhone, Xbox, PS3 and any other platform you can think of. Not a new idea I mean PES (Pro Evolution Soccer) comes out on most platforms with varying degrees of graphics and intelligence depending on platform constraints, which would be the same for our game. The core of my idea was to store user saved data online and allow players to play from the same point in a role playing game on any platform. Currently if I have Half-Life on PC and have almost completed the game I couldn’t pick up my PS2 and continue from the same spot, with our system you could. To make it even better we would supply the game to you on any platform for free over the internet, gamers would just pay a subscription to access their user data and the game could only be played via the data on our servers. The concept would be commercially viable now and could potentially turn the way we pay for games and use an array of gaming devices on its head.

There where only two problems when running it past Dan, firstly we had 12 weeks to create this framework and a killer game to run on it, there isn’t enough time if you take into account our other modules on the go. Secondly we had to create a killer game and that is difficult enough without creating an entire new framework also. Thus we presented Air’s idea to Dan and the issue with this was as we suspected, it had no hook nor gripping gameplay mechanic. Back to the drawing board.

Dan did actually say one thing when pulling apart both ideas.

“If you had said Sardines merged with another game”

Well we thought, none of this ‘if’ let’s do it. Let’s merge sardines with something. Well we had already gone down the road of location based gaming for the iPhone, so there was only one thing that could spawn from this really. Sardines over a large area using the iPhone as a finding aide by displaying the user a compass which pointed them in the right direction, kind of and a hot/cold meter. What we were also able to do is use a server to mediate the game meaning people can join or leave a game whilst the game is in motion, giving the possibility of an endless game. The hook, the gameplay mechanic, the innovation, it’s all there really, thus we’ve already scoped the game screens and are beginning programing very soon.

Naturally I kicked of the ideas with Wet Room Entertainment, which I thought was a good name it had all the attributes; catchy, quirky and symbolised something (surfing, of course). It was vetoed instantly. The debate continued and didn’t really go anywhere, we all just looked at each other.

I got proactive and busted out the pen and paper. I just wrote words down that came to my head, that allowed me to spawn other words on the same lines, word association if you will. This helped everyone else to spin in words. We were looking for something cool and symbolic about our standards. Then came the suggestion of EPIC from Pete. Just on it’s own it makes sense, kind of. We are EPIC, are games are EPIC. It’s short, catchy and memorable. Little did I know it’s actually the producers of Unreal Tournament, but it’s too late to change it now, we have a logo and everything.