Jeff Hangartner, the founder of the gaming start-up, Bulletproof Outlaws has been a professional developer of games over the last half a decade. Creator of Pixelation, the 1st Pixel Art Forum and also originator of the Pixel tutorials which have been published in the form of a book. Jeff has always been a pioneer of the gaming industry.
CG Today is proud to present Jeff’s exploration as he shares the whole process of creating a start-up right from day 1. With the belief that gaming development is coming back to its original “one programmer in the basement roots” idea, Bulletproof Outlaws is chronicling every step of its start-up process from strategies, to marketing, setting goals and outsourcing, successes and failures. The aim is to help other developers who have ideas but are intimidated by the whole start-up process and are not sure how to go about it.
You can visit his website Bulletproof Outlaws to know more about him or send an email to get connected.
So I’ve posted the job up at oDesk and eLance, two of the large freelance sites. I went through the Game Design Doc and summarized it into just one page of blabbing and I picked out the key things the game requires that may take special skills or attention from the developer. Like I need someone that knows how to use Cocos2D, and how to integrate Twitter into the game for posting scores, etc. so I made sure to mention this in the posting.
I read a bunch of other game dev job postings and a lot of them were super vague and clearly not proof-read, etc. so I didn’t end up using any of them as a guide. I just wung it, and here’s what I posted:
The game is a simple 2D reflex game for the iPhone and iPad, using the Cocos 2D framework. I will provide all art and audio assets! The game will need 2 versions, one for the iPhone that detects retina support for the iPhone 4, and a version for the iPad. I will provide appropriately sized art for each screen resolution.
The player touches his finger on the screen to make the ninja dodge throwing-stars and other items that fly toward him. As the time counts up, the game gets progressively faster and the player’s goal is to survive as long as possible!
This is only a brief description of the game, there’s an actual Game Design Document that explains all the details and has mock-up images and tables to make development easier. The entire game is already designed, I simply need a developer to piece it all together!
Key requirements and notes:
- Only Landscape mode will be needed
- I’ll require daily builds for testing purposes
- An animation parser built for Cocos 2D will be provided, along with the necessary files and documentation to use it (it’s a VERY simple bit of code, don’t worry!)
- The game will need a timer that counts up, displaying how long the player has survived
- The time will need to be recorded on an Apple Game Center leaderboard and the player should be able to send their score to Facebook and Twitter, so you should have experience integrating Apple Game Center, Facebook, and Twitter into an App
- Achievements should use the Apple Game Center as well
- It would be nice if the top player’s name and score were displayed on the screen during gameplay but I understand this might not be possible!
- A reminder for the player to review the game should pop up after the game is played a few times
- The game should use Flurry Analytics to track some anonymous game statistics
- Certain sound effects will need to play randomly from a list (for example when the ninja shouts, it randomly chooses between shout1, shout2, and shout3)
- A very simple menu option should allow the player to scroll through a list of all the sounds in the game and listen to them (just a default list like the ringtone choice in the iPhone’s settings is fine)
- I’m keeping a development blog of the game’s progress at http://www.bulletproofoutlaws.com/ which you can check out for more information on the game.
Please be available to work on this full-time as I need to release it as soon as possible. Also please have samples of your work. I’m looking for a developer who has experience with Games, not just Apps, because this will be more complicated than a menu-based Shopping List App.
If things go smooth there will be more work available in the future as I’m going to be creating a new game every month or so.
Type: Hourly
Workload: Full-time – 30+ hrs/week
Duration: Less than 1 month
Planned Start: March 1, 2011
So now I’m finally officially looking for a programmer, feel free to pass the word around or send a portfolio to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ! I’ll do a write-up in a few days about how the applications went and how I end up choosing whoever I go with.
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it | Web: Bulletproof Outlaws