The Team Phobic Philosophy - Part One

So the other day I was thinking, we've never really explained who Team Phobic is and why we are here making games.  Team Phobic has been a dream of ours since we were all young.  Back then we were learning anything from HTML to QBasic to C++.  Some of our first games were made using the Allegro gaming library which I would highly recommend to anyone wanting to learn how to make games.

While Team Phobic includes a larger amount of people, I'm going to mostly be talking about the four founders: myself(Jonas), Galen, Brian and Jeff.

I was not one of the original believers of Team Phobic.  I met Brian in middle school and the rest in high school.  Until high school I made random web sites that pretty much did nothing, it was fun and I always liked to learn how to do something new, whether it be creating an e-mail form or create a PHP script that makes image thumbnails, I pretty much did everything.  Then I got into making a lot of mods for games.  Some of my best work I did was for Stellar Frontier which I made maps and even graphics for.  As I met the others my desire to make my own games increased and I started learning C++ and using Allegro.  After high school I went to Colorado State University until I decided to move back to Boulder and really start living the dream.

So Galen mysteriously moved to Colorado and met up with Jeff in middle school.  They were both making games, Jeff in QBasic and Galen in C++.  Galen's original company was called Infestedfurby  Software. Eventually they started working on Team Phobic's first big project, CTF.  CTF is all about the engine, and even today it's being built upon and parts are used.  Galen went to the University of Colorado and graduated with two majors, Computer Science and Applied Math four years later.

Brian grew up loving Nintendo and always knew he wanted to make games.  He began making art, and sending it to Nintendo after playing Donkey Kong.  He made his own card games and played with friends throughout middle school. When he met up with Jeff and Galen he started to make 3d models and animations for CTF and later level designs as well.

While CTF was starting to look very good there was just too much work to be done so it was decided a smaller game needed to be made first.  Electropy was born, after 2 years of on and off work it became crunch time upon application to Tech Stars.  Galen and Jeff were programming, Brian was making art and I was making web services for scoring systems.  Electropy went from a concept to a complete game in around 4 months and Team Phobic, LLC was incorporated to start selling.  Check out the release video.  While we thought, and still do think, Electropy is the most awesome game ever we did not get into Tech Stars, or a nomination to the student competition of IGF, but this only motivated us to make something even better.

So that's the short version to the beginning of Team Phobic.  In my next post I'll be talking about how we got onto the iPhone and what we are doing now.  In my final post in this series I'll be explaining what exactly the Team Phobic philosophy is.

Updates

Alright, I've been really lazy making any sort of updates to this blog so I've decided to send it a little love.

As of late I've moved back to Boulder, got a job as a CRM consultant and working on Team Phobic.  We released our first iPhone game, iTD, at the end of October.  After things went pretty bad with the company other members of Team Phobic we working at they ended up switching to working full time for Team Phobic.  In about 6 weeks we made our second game, Bounce On, which has been selling very well.  Now we are working on updates for both of our games and trying to keep up the momentum.

I've been frequently posting about our games on the Touch Arcade forums and it has proven to be great help with getting feedback and spreading exposure.  We've gotten some reviews and most people have been impressed.

So what's next for Team Phobic?  Well I can promise updates to our current iPhone games.  Electropy has been reduced to only $9.99 to celebrate it's one year release.  We have so many plans in the future and we are now off to a great start.

iTD iPhone Game Released

Team Phobic has released our second game, iPhone Tower Defense for theiPhone and iPod touch. Strategically build different types of towersto destroy the oncoming waves of enemies. It supports multi-touch,pinch-zoom, original music, and 9 challenging levels. Download ittoday directly from your iPhone/iPod touch or from iTunes!

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New Server, Optimizations

So we got a new server at work to run my ETL program on.  It's a HP blade with two duel core AMD Opterons and 10GB of ram.  We installed Windows Server 2008 on it and a version of Visual Studio Team Suite so now I have some useful profiling tools.  I found out my program spends 10% of its time on the ToLower() string command.  Our CRM system is weird with strings and *sometimes* returns attribute types with capitals and *sometimes* does gives them all in lowercase depending on where you get them from.  The problem ended up being in this function, which was a pretty big bottleneck:

public static string getAttributeType(string entity, string attribute)
{

    foreach (CRMAttribute attrib in attributes)
    {
        if (attrib.entityName.ToLower() == entity.ToLower()
            && attrib.attribute.ToLower() == attribute.ToLower())
        {
            return attrib.type;
        }
    }
}

I hadn't realized it would be called so much, so I replaced it with a hash lookup and now it goes much faster.  I always liked how profiling tools show you such unexpected results when you get into a project of this magnitude.

The other bottleneck is threads waiting on other threads... I'm not sure what I can do about this but I'm going to be investigating.  There isn't too much time I have to be working on optimizations because the majority of the program is it spending all of its time publishing to the CRM webservice which we can't speed up.

Advisor Scheduler

So I've been assigned at work to write an advisor scheduling program.  It has to interact with Exchange 2007 mailboxes which is going to be the real trick of completing it.  I've written one before but it was buggy and used WebDAV services to interact with Exchange Server 2003 which didn't work on our multiple domain system.  I'm really looking forward to getting to use the new Exchange Server 2007 web services which should be a lot easier than hacking up everything with WevDAV.  The key here is going to be a very simple user interface for both the advisors and the students.  I also want to make it customizable because my previous version caught the attention of other departments across campus and I'm going to keep in mind portability while writing this.

One of the purposes of this blog is to provide some technical information for reference for myself and others.  There have been countless times I have searched for information and found answers on blogs, I can only hope that this blog can return some of that help to others.

the next step

So we've released Electropy.  Our sales have been doing fairly decent for our first game.  We need to work on getting the word out and spreading the download link to the demo.  Unfortunately we did not make the IGF finalists so we will not be attending GDC.  While we were certainly upset by this, we quickly recovered and started talking about our next game.  We are expanding out and making a plot driven game that will be much more marketable.  We have learned from Electropy an immense amount and are all extremely proud to have taken the first step with our first game and consider it a massive success.

I've been working on the idea behind our next game for quite some time, so it already has about two years of thought into it.  Now that it has been introduced to the rest of the team there are so many great ideas and it reminds me why I am so lucky to be on such a talented team.

Our lead artist, Brian Powers, made these renders you can check out, they simply look amazing and give a hint of the atmosphere we are going for in our next game.

It's going to be very enjoyable because I am much more involved in the design and coding process behind this game.  I'm hoping we can release it in eight months so stay tuned.

http://www.cortech9.com

release

So we have released Electropy for sale. We are staying a bit quiet about it till we get a few more things kinked out but will start announcements later today (its 2:43 AM). We actually had the game for sale since yesterday but we were testing out the store.

I've rewritten the entire scores database so I've got some rewriting of the website to do, I have most of it done but the high scores list isn't displaying the best times for each level yet, you have to go to the level specifically.

Things have been going pretty darn crazy around here... either working on the game or working on figuring out how to get a company started, not to mention we are all in school and have finals going on right now. 3 of us have jobs so as you can imagine we are awfully busy! My days consist of waking up, going to work, going to work(at my second job) coming home, doing any school work and then working on Team Phobic stuff until roughly 4AM, then waking up the next morning and repeat. It's pretty hectic but it is pretty fun, I can't wait till we start making some money so I can lower my hours on the jobs and start making games. We already started planning our next project and we got so exciting just talking about it, it is so great to have something we can all be so excited about doing.

IGF student finalists are announced tomorrow. I'm so excited, but also worried. If we don't make it then I'm going to be very disappointed. We are a bit worried about the judging criteria they will use. It would be so amazing for us to get to go to GDC, it would be such a huge step for us to take, not that we aren't already racing up the stairs.

If anyone out there is interested in writing a review for Electropy we would be more than happy to provide a copy of the game if the site is well established, just e-mail contact@teamphobic.com

Other than that, head over to electropy.com and buy the game! :-) we are gonna stay away from the high scores so other people have a chance so nows the time to get the #1 score! I just played through Gosu difficulty with only using 11 continues and I'm very happy with that... this game can get hard but it is oodles of fun.