Today i am going to try out the new development blog! The snowferno website is nearly ready to go live, so this is where all the new content will live.. for older stuff (although there isnt much) you can check out my blog at : benbritten.com/blog or the Rollover blog at fatlabmusic.com/blog.

So, to kick things off let me just give a bit of backstory on this project. We started it roughly at the end of the year last year (sort of xmas time 2008). And by 'started' I mean we decided that we wanted to collaborate on an iPhone game, tho we had no idea what to make.

Ultimately the idea to do a rolling ball game was made, I think mostly because the 'rolling ball game controlled with the accelerometer' seems to be the 'hello world' of game genres on the iPhone. So it seemed like the right place to start.

In early january I started looking at my options for coding the game ( I am doing all the coding, the boys at Fatlab are doing all the sound/music and most of the level design). I knew we were going to want to use 'real' physics, so that was really the only requirement I started out with.

I have written my own 'game engines' (if they can be called that, a more apt term might be 'openGL|ES code harness') and was trying to figure out how long it would take me to bolt a physics engine onto my existing tool base.

During this time I looked at a dozen or so open source physics libraries, and they all looked capable enough. However I also remembered my old friend Unity, and had heard that they recently released something that could build apps for the iPhone.

So, in the midst of downloading and evaluating all the physics libraries I also got a trial copy of unity and tried to build a quick prototype. Turns out, Unity has a pretty shallow learning curve, and I had a working prototype 'level' (if you could call it that) in about 3 hours.

That pretty much sealed the deal for me and Unity. I bought a copy later that week and started learning Unity in earnest.

This is about the same time that the Fatlab boys came up with the excellent idea of the snowball rolling through hell. Thus, Snowferno was born :-)