Creative Flair

The Incident

This is the second post in the Limitation = Inspiration series: Here I’m taking a look at a particular iOS app that has embraced the limitations of the platform and been designed to use them to its advantage. See the first post for more information on the topic.

I’m sure many readers are already familiar with The Incident - one of the year’s most addictive iOS games.

For those that aren’t, here’s the premise: You play as Frank, an innocent bystander caught up in an unexplained global incident which has caused everyday objects to rain from the sky. Using tilt controls, you must control Frank to dodge falling objects and use the ever-growing pile of debris to climb as high as possible.

Those responsible at Big Bucket Software are Matt Comi and Neven Mrgan. Until recently, Matt had a separate full-time job, whilst Neven works as a designer at Panic - makers of some of the finest software for the mac. Amazingly, The Incident was conceived, designed and developed in their free time.

The game’s App Store ratings show just how popular it is with players.

That hasn’t stopped it being a runaway success though; the game is currently doing very well in the App Store, having been featured by Apple and currently enjoying a snug spot in the top 100 in various regions. The success of the game spurred Matt to quit his 9-5 job and turn Big Bucket into a full-time gig.

So far, The Incident has gathered a dedicated fanbase, with blogs such as Death by Objects and Incide Jokes springing up over the last few months. Frank has also gone on to appear as a guest opponent in iPhone strategy game Carcassonne.

Me VS Frank in Carcassonne.

The Incident is not only addictive and fun to play, but it stands as a shining example of one of the most beautiful and original iPhone and iPad titles yet. The simple control scheme, gorgeous retro graphics, music and sound effects add up to an impressive package.

However, while The Incident oozes retro from every pixel, it’s not a game that would have been anywhere near so much fun to play on the older gaming systems from which it draws inspiration. I can’t imagine that controlling Frank using a d-pad and jump button would feel anywhere near as satisfying (or frantic) as tilting the device to dodge falling objects. As with all content on the iPhone and iPad, being able to directly manipulate what’s on screen removes a layer of abstraction found in classic retro titles. The Incident is a game inspired by the old, but tailored perfectly to the new.

The game manages to overcome the limitations of the iPhone and iOS incredibly well. For example, the graphics and gameplay both scale flawlessly to the iPad. In fact, the game is actually more fun to play on the iPad; the larger screen size increases the sense of urgency, and it’s easier to appreciate Neven’s pixel-perfect work on a bigger screen. The game’s bold use of colourful 8-bit graphics is a testament to the fact that there is still a lot of life in (and much love for) such retro styles. 

Besides the fluid control scheme and beautiful graphics, the other stars of The Incident are its retro chiptunes, composed by Panic’s Cabel Sasser. Players listening to their own music (or none at all) whilst playing (common limitations of mobile gaming) are really missing out - The Incident is a game best played turned up to 11.

Other developers should take note of Big Bucket’s hard work and dedication. Today, The Incident stands as one of the most fun, wholly original and authentically retro titles available in the App Store; the only iOS game I’ve seen that looks to rival it is Shaun Inman’s upcoming Mimeoverse.

I spoke to Neven about how the limitations of iOS as a platform, and those presented by the iPhone and iPad hardware, affected his role as designer:

Could you tell me a little about how Matt and yourself came to decide on the control-scheme of The Incident - did you try out any alternatives before settling on the tilt and shake mechanics that we now all know and love?

We played with a few different mechanics. Onscreen buttons were no more precise than tilt controls, and they obscured far too much of the screen for our liking. Gestures were largely unnecessary since we wanted to keep the core controls simple. I do wonder how the game would play with a physical D-pad; we may never know…  

Obviously the absence of any physical buttons is only one of the iPhone’s hardware imitations. Designing for different screen resolutions could have also posed a problem, but you guys did a great job working around that. Did you encounter any other limitations of the iPhone or iOS itself that you had to think about how to deal with or design around?

It’s interesting that you mention different resolutions because they’re an example of a problem the iOS ecosystem introduces that’s actually a matter of too *much* complexity. I’m not saying this is a consequence of some misstep on Apple’s part, it’s just natural given the novelty of iOS devices and the speed with which they’re being updated. This is great news for consumers and for developers - for the most part. It can be a bit overwhelming, keeping up with all the new goodies.

For example, multitasking arrived well into our development cycle. We had expected it, but we had no idea of how it might work. It’s a great feature, but the implementation makes the developer do a whole lot more work than the user might expect. While its debatable whether Apple could’ve made this simpler, whats probably not in question is how the super-casual nature of the devices - the iPhone in particular - makes task-switching a lot more frequent and prominent than it’s been on other platforms.

On a gaming console such as the Xbox, players don’t switch games every few minutes, they don’t play in 30-second spurts, and they don’t have their games constantly interrupted with phone calls, notifications, and trees they’re about to walk into. Even on the PC, a fast-paced game wont have the player switching away every few minutes. If they do switch, players know to pause the game after making sure they’ve hit a checkpoint, saved their progress, etc. 

On the iPhone, the home button is so frequently pressed that we have to consider lots of different scenarios and be both diligent and clever about how we remember our spot. Since saving the exact position of all the physics objects when the player exits is prohibitively slow, we have to figure out how to best arrange our checkpoints and save as much as we can, without opening the game to cheating based on intentional game exits and restarts.   

You could argue that this is a “limitation” of the iOS from the developer’s perspective, but to the user it’s a welcome new feature, this ability to nuke a game safely without thinking twice.

As for the actual limitations of the super-slim pocket-computer our game runs on, they are what they are. We’d love to have twice the memory and trice the CPU, but we try to leave hope for miracles aside and work with what we’ve got.     

When working to finish version 1.0 of The Incident, did the open-ended development cycle afforded by iOS come into play when deciding on cutting or not including features in the first release, or affect the way you designed elements of the game itself?

That’s a really interesting point. When we started out, I approached the game like a novel: it’s canonical from the first issue, and you don’t issue updates because you thought of more stuff. But that’s of course neither in the spirit of the platform we work in and the century we live in, nor a great idea in itself. As we got closer to completing the implementation of our original idea, i had to remind myself that any new features we came up with could wait, otherwise we’d never release the app.

And of course, no amount of testing will reveal all potential weak spots, especially not those related to long-term gameplay. It’s great that we have the option to update the game with relatively few pains, and we’re excited to add new features.    

Do you have any other final thoughts or comments on how designing around limitations of the hardware or iOS affected the design and development process?

Having never developed a game for another platform, I’m not sure how this compares. It’s the first time in my life, however, that my lifelong dream of working on, finishing, and releasing a computer game has been completely feasible. 

Having quizzed Neven on design challenges, I asked Matt if he could tell me about any problems he was forced to overcome from a development standpoint. He explained a nice trick he came up with to combat slowdown of the first generation iPhone’s older CPU:

So, in The Incident, items fall from the sky and the player must dodge and climb them. It appears to the player as though the pile continues to grow forever. But on the 1st generation iPhone, a single screen full of items is nearly enough to make the CPU struggle. So I only keep about two screen’s worth of items in memory at any time.

How it works:

Items are deleted sometime after they disappear off the bottom of the screen. But before they can be deleted, they must pass through the “freezer”. Items in the freezer are stationary and don’t obey the laws of physics, e.g. they can float. These frozen items provide a solid foundation for the active/visible items and prevent the pile from collapsing whenever an item is deleted.

So what’s next for The Incident? Version 1.2 should be in players hands soon, featuring a small but significant gameplay tweak to deter players who managed to find a way to cheat their way to the top of the pile (see The Big Bucket blog for more info). Seeing how dedicated both Neven and Matt are to the game, I’m sure we’ll be seeing many great updates in the future.

I’d like to thank both Neven and Matt for lending some of their valuable time to answer some questions for this piece, it wouldn’t have been much without their input!

For more information about how The Incident was adapted for the iPad, check out Matt Comi’s blog post on the subject.

For a whole load more information from Neven Mrgan about designing the Incident, I’d recommend checking out Tim Van Damme’s interview over at The Box.

Stay tuned to the Big Bucket blog for the latest news on Matt and The Incident.

Check out Neven Mrgan’s blog for occasional Incident-related tidbits and a constant source of interesting articles.

Buy the official The Incident T-shirt over at Buy Olympia: http://www.buyolympia.com/q/Item=the-incident-shirt

Finally, a special thanks to Max Steenbergen for offering support and advice on this article!