Feature: 'Postmortem: Naked Sky Entertainment's RoboBlitz'

Among the first games to utilize Epic's Unreal Engine 3, Naked Sky's RoboBlitz squeezed a great deal into 50mb for its Xbox Live Arcade release. In this Gamasutra postmortem, we learn firsthand the joys and pitfalls of the self-funded indie team's first title. In this excerpt, Naked Sky describe the birth of the RoboBlitz project from tech-demo to fully formed 19 level game: "It all started with a technology demo for the Intel dual-core processor. Developed in eight weeks and showcased at the 2005 IDF and GDC, the RoboBlitz Tech Demo (aka RoboHordes) was an Unreal Engine 3-based, single-level game that featured entirely physics-driven game play. When people approached us at GDC, asking questions like, "Who is publishing this?" and "When is it coming out," we realized we needed to develop it into a full-fledged game. Unfortunately, the original game was built purely as a tech demo, so in order to develop a robust and engaging commercial product, we had to rip out and re-implement pretty much all the code, art, and design. When it came to the question of how to go about distributing the game, we were confronted with several challenges. We wanted to keep control of the intellectual property while staying independent, which steered us away from the traditional publishing route. Thankfully, we met with the Live Arcade group at Microsoft when they were in the early stages of forming their plans for the upcoming Xbox 360. It was the perfect platform for RoboBlitz, as long as we could keep our title under 50MB. Because we decided to go the self-funding route, we didn’t enter full production until November 2005, after raising private funding and getting an office. The game was finished eleven months later. As an indie developer, we pretty much encountered every obstacle imaginable in the process. Fortunately, we pulled through and are now the proud parents of RoboBlitz!" You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject with more on what what went right and what went wrong during the development of RoboBlitz (no registration required, please feel free to link to this column from external websites).