Making an innovative iOS game in SpritKit with no budget, experience or time

Mitchell McEwan, TBD Game Company (@mitchmcewan)

Who doesn’t want to publish a game on the App Store these days? We did and as easy as it is to follow a tutorial and just publish another clone as our first game, we instead wanted to publish something a little different. But how do you create a novel experience for players with no budget, experience or time?

This talk shares the journey into designing the iOS game 'Endless Runner X' in Swift and SpriteKit. It highlights insights from the process, how we worked to our strengths, cut corners, scoped properly, and faked it until we created something special that managed to get government funding.

About Mitchell McEwan

Dr Mitchell McEwan is a co-founder and director at TBD Game Company where he leads production, games user research and level design. His doctoral work explored how natural control interfaces and player characteristics influence intuitive interaction and the psychological experience of video game play. Since commencing his Masters work on games design, Mitchell has led the design and development of several software prototypes across a range of cross- disciplinary research projects. Mitchell has also lectured university-level video game design, production and evaluation subjects as well as units focused on gamification and interaction design.