Yes, I designed the original Fruit Ninja. I spent the last couple of
weeks finding decade-old photos, old presentations, and blurry 360p footage from old YouTube to try and tell the
story as well as possible. So, let's get started. It's 2009, and the iPhone 3GS is the latest
and greatest in phone technology. It's also a built-in digital compass. At age 25, I am somehow running a team of
seven at Halfbrick Studios. We had just released a game I had designed
called Rocket Racing for the PSP. Rocket Racing was my first real original IP
game, an insanely high-skill-ceiling futuristic racer. Oh, hey, did you hear that? That ended up being part of the combo sound
in Fruit Ninja. Anyway, the game did terribly and lost us
a whole heap of money, and this was not good. As a studio, we were trying to transition
away from making licensed games to original IP, and it was not going very well. The global financial crisis was in full swing,
and the whole studio was on the ropes. Value gone. At some point, I sat down with the whole team
and explained the situation. We had 12 months to make three hundred thousand
dollars; otherwise, we'd better start polishing our portfolios because we'd all be out of
a job pretty soon. To try and help come up with new IP, the studio
was running an initiative called Halfbrick Fridays, inspired by Google's 20%-time. We could pitch a game idea to the entire company
and then spend every second Friday working on prototypes for that game. The CEO of Halfbrick Studios and my boss,
Shainiel Deo, asked us to really focus on iPhone games, games that could be played by
anyone. I was racking my brain for something to pitch
at Halfbrick Fridays, and all I really knew is I wanted to make the game that was the
exact opposite of Rocket Racing, something that was easy to play, grounded in the real
world, and super intuitive. So, I just sat down in front of a piece of
paper and started to think through verbs of what interactions you could make with a touch
screen: tap, hold, drag, swipe. What's another word for swipe? Slice! And then all of a sudden, a whole bunch of
things clicked into place in my brain. I remember this old knife commercial that
I'm watching at like 4 AM, slicing fruit in the air. It was perfect. And weirdly, the other thing that clicked
into my brain was Quake III, specifically the visceral satisfaction of fragging someone. Most iPhone games at the time had a really
clean aesthetic, but I wanted something that was messy and satisfying, something gory if
you can believe it. And slicing fruit, that was perfect for this. It could be G-rated gore. These are the first-ever concepts of Fruit
Ninja that I whipped up in about 30 minutes, and you can see how I wanted to lean hard
on the gore angle from my original tagline for the game. The gore angle is actually something we held
onto for quite a long time, and you can see it in one of these shirts that we really wanted
to make. But I'm pretty sure this one didn't get made. Anyway, I pitched this to the whole company,
and mostly no one cared. Everyone thought it was too simple. We were a company of hardcore gamers, and
to a lot of people, this was more like some kind of kids' toy. So, it just kind of went on the backburner. Soon after, most of my team got moved to help
get another license game over the line, but they just needed code and art. No design help was required. This left myself and our other designer, Joe
Gatling, kind of with nothing to do other than figure out what project we should meet
next, and it needed to be something we could make really fast. We literally didn't have the time or money
to make something that took a year or more, so we came up with a plan to make as many
prototypes as we could in just two weeks. The theory was, if we couldn't make a prototype
in just, like, a couple of days, it was probably too big of an idea for us to make really fast
like we wanted to. So, we sat down and came up with roughly 30
ideas for possible prototypes, and of course, we just threw Fruit Ninja into that mix. Using Flash and good old-fashioned ActionScript
(I love ActionScript), we prototyped a bunch of these really fast, and one of these was
the original Fruit Ninja idea. This prototype, built by Joe in just two days,
was instantly fun to play. The mouse wasn't ideal, but you got the idea. In fact, it was fun enough that we thought
we'd try a spin-off as well called Canned Fruit Ninja, and that just was not nearly
as good as the original Fruit Ninja. At the end of the two weeks of prototyping,
we picked the two prototypes that we thought held the most promise and decided to move
them both into production at the same time. So, we would split our team of seven down
the middle and have half the team working on one, and half the team working on the other. It was actually kind of complicated because
a lot of things were moving at that time, and I actually ended up being the lead designer
on both prototypes at the same time, which was crazy. And of course, one of the games we ended up
picking was Fruit Ninja, and the other one was what eventually became Monster Dash, which
later was the starting point for Jetpack Joyride. Out of these two, Fruit Ninja was actually
the risky one. We figured Monster Dash was kind of a safe
bet because it was just basically Canabalt with guns. So, joining me on Team Fruit Ninja, we had
Shath, our artist who had heaps of experience and who had been working with me for years,
and we also had Steve, who at just 20 years old, would be the sole programmer. Now, I want to be clear here, there were lots
of people who contributed to Fruit Ninja through the process. We had our sound designer, our producer, QA. We had marketing, we had the tech team who
were building the engine we were using because we weren't using an off-the-shelf engine,
and of course, we had the support of my boss. But the base team who were making the game
right at the start was myself, Shath, and Steve. So, the three of us got to work, and things
started happening fast. Shath created every single piece of art in
a single shot. It was just like, 'Uh, fruit done, fruit done.' There was no concept here or anything. It was because it was so easy to make, it
just started. Everything just flowed. Steve quickly had the fruit popping up in
the slicing mechanic working, and we invested a lot of our time trying to make the fruit
splatters feel as appealing as possible. We had all three of us crowded around one
iPhone 3GS, tweaking every single aspect of the particles and the effects. One of the really big design philosophies
here was contrast, bringing as much contrast as possible into every single aspect of the
game. So, for the background, I wanted something
as plain and dark as possible so that the fruit splatters and the fruit themselves would
just pop off of the background. The same was true of our audio design, with sound effects and music
created by Jesse Higginson. Instead of just having a soundtrack playing
in the background, we went with the ambient sounds of, like, a quiet zen garden, so the
impact and the pop and the splatter and carnage of the fruit would just stand out and contrast
so much, making it really impactful. Back then, Fruit Ninja was so simple. There were no modes. Classic Mode wasn't called Classic Mode; it
was just the game. And it was so small that we obsessed over
every single detail. Like, we were super careful about how we designed
the collisions for the fruit and the bombs. The fruit actually have a slightly oversized
collision, while the bombs have a slightly undersized collision. The fruit also have priority in pushing the
bombs out of the way, but the bombs can sneak in behind the fruit. It's this balancing act of making the game
fair in some ways and a little bit unfair in others. I wanted it to be a little bit unfair because
I wanted the player to have something to blame other than themselves when they didn't get
a high score. Like, you could go, 'Damn it, if there just
wasn't that bomb hiding behind that watermelon, I could've gotten my high score.' That was all on purpose. Even the specifics of the RNG and the way
that the fruit was spawned and the wave design had heaps of careful love and attention put
into it. In fact, I've done an entire hour-long talk
at a conference before about that. At some point, Joe came up with the genius
idea of making it so you had to slice a watermelon to start the game, and I just loved this. It instantly taught you how to play the game
before you even started. So, we added it right away to playtesting. Our producer, Jason Harwood, would take the
game down to a bus stop right down the road and just get people to play right there while
they're waiting for their bus. We didn't want to test the game just with
gamers; we wanted to test it on everyone. And because there were just so many people
playing for such short bursts of time and giving just raw, unvarnished feedback, we
were really able to get that starting experience as good as possible. One thing we quickly learned was no one knew
how to use the menu. Everyone tried to tap the watermelon to start
and then just gave the phone back, like, 'Oh, it's broken.' So, we just detected if anyone was trying
to tap the watermelon and added a little hand swiping across it, and boom, problem solved. And just like that, the game was done. In total, we had only spent six weeks on it,
from a blank project to a completed game ready to release. The next job was to come up with a marketing
plan with our marketing manager, Phil Larsen. At the start of 2010, everyone had started
making really slick, high-production trailers for their iPhone games. We didn't have any budget, we didn't have
any production to throw at it, so we figured we would go the opposite way. We figured we would stand out by being as
weird and indie and cheap as possible. So, I bought about twenty dollars worth of
fruit, Phil rented out some goofy costumes from the costume shop, and we just ran around
in a public park acting like idiots for an hour and boom, that was the trailer done. A few weeks later, at the end of April 2010,
we released the game. It didn't just blow up right away; it wasn't
instantly a success. At the very beginning, it was making a hundred
dollars per day, which wasn't enough to keep the lights on. But relative to some of our other projects,
that were surprisingly good, on a Friday, it actually overtook Doodle Jump in the Australian
charts. We were still really low everywhere else,
but still, this was a huge accomplishment for us. We were super excited. So, to celebrate, we sat around and had one,
two, three, or maybe many more beers that evening. And then, as the night was wrapping up, all
of a sudden, we saw an email come in. I have no idea why we had our email open,
but we did. Anyway, the email was from Apple, and they wanted to feature the game,
which was an absolutely massive deal. The only problem was they needed the feature
art, like, in a few hours. We needed to do it right away. Shath had actually already gone home, so we
had to call him back in. And then, with everyone, with definitely more
than a few beers under the belt, we actually put together the original Apple marketing
promotion art for it. And once Apple featured the game, that's when
things really started to pick up steam. We went from making a hundred dollars a day
to a thousand dollars a day, and then a lot more. Steve, Shath, and I had this idea that when
we hit one million fruit sliced, we were gonna have a party. The first time that we checked that statistic,
we hit 275 million fruit sliced already. But our work was far from over. We knew that the game was too small and too
simple to hold people's interest for very long, so it was updating time. And boy, did we update. In the first 12 months, we shipped 14 updates
for the game. And if you think that sounds stressful, you
would be right. Early on, we were tracking all of the top
requests for updates to the game, and there was a lot of interest in things like multi-slice
and having the fruits separate really accurately. This was something I really pushed back on
quite hard. And to me, adding complexity like this would have been the first step
in eroding that foundation that made the game what it is. These were inevitably done by other games,
such as Veggie Samurai, and I always felt like we had made the right decision by not
going down this road. But a lot of people did suggest a no bombs
Zen mode, and this was a great idea. We definitely did this. I knew that for Zen mode to be interesting,
we needed something more than just slicing the fruit without bombs. So, the obvious solution was to add combos. Before I even had a chance to sit down and
design how the combo system would work, Steve just did it. He just came up to me and was like, 'Hey,
combos are done.' I played it, and it was literally perfect. We never changed a thing. He just nailed it first go. And as we made more and more updates, the
game just continued to grow and grow. And before I knew it, we were celebrating
1 million copies sold. Well, it was just none of us could ever have
predicted that it would do so well. And of course, none of us had any idea that
this was still just the beginning of the Fruit Ninja journey. And by this stage, the team had really grown. The number of people at the company working
on Fruit Ninja in some form was massive. We needed versions for Android, Windows Phone,
iPad, support for different features and tech. And this wasn't made in Unity or anything;
this was a bespoke games engine. So making these ports was a lot of work. And during this period, so
many people contributed, way more than I can honestly remember. But at its core, for Mainline Fruit Ninja,
it was still just the three of us banging out features and coming up with ideas. The next big update we did was Sensei Swag. So we knew we wanted a shop where you could
unlock blades and backgrounds. And the obvious solution for this was to have
currency in the game that you could collect. We tried doing it where we sliced star fruit
and these silver coins came out, but this just really didn't feel right to me. So instead, we went with an achievement-style
unlocking system. And this was really fun because it could make
all kinds of weird and subversive achievements for you to unlock the blades. So, for example, to unlock Mr. Sparkle, you
had to slice three pineapples in a row, which there was a chance you could do randomly,
or if you read the achievement, you could do it pretty easily, but you needed to apply
a little bit of strategy. And we had some really weird ones, like, 'Oh,
you have to play the game upside down for a whole game.' And we had other ones that didn't make it,
like, 'You have to play the game at night in complete darkness,' and we would use the
little light sensor at the front. That one didn't make it into the game because
it meant we had to have the light sensor active the entire time you were playing, which used
a bunch of battery. But anyway, it was really fun coming up with
these. When we were designing the different background
wallpapers you could have, we also had the idea of, 'Oh, maybe you should be able to
just pick whatever background you want from your camera roll.' And we tested this, and it just did not look
right at all. It's funny now because this version of the
dojo that worked in this way, I think only lasted the first two years. The shop itself and that whole system in Fruit
Ninja have been changed heaps of times over the years, and so there's probably a bunch
of people that don't even remember when it used to work this way. Next up, iOS 4.1 came along, and that added
real-time multiplayer matchmaking through Game Center. Hey, remember when Game Center had the crazy
pool table aesthetic? Ah, those were the days. And so to be at the front of that wave, we
really quickly smashed out multiplayer in just a couple of weeks. I think in total, I had about four days to
design how the actual mode would work, and then Steve, plus some other programmers, just
went through and absolutely smashed it out so fast so that we could be one of the first
real-time multiplayer Game Center games. This mode has not existed for a long time,
and I had a really hard time even finding any footage of it. We also had another mode planned that we'd
been teasing through this mystery banana mode, which is what would eventually become arcade
mode, and eventually that became the most popular part of the game when we released
it. It really gave it a new uptick in trajectory,
but still, that didn't exist yet. This ended up being a huge lift. It took over three months to design arcade
mode, and that was more than twice as long as it took to make the entire first version
of the game. It was heavily inspired by Bejeweled Blitz
on Facebook, with this crazy exponential scoring, deep power-up system, and 60-second game mode
time. But everything that I tried to make something
like this just didn't feel right. Once again, we tried the currency that we
could use to unlock and buy power-ups each round of arcade mode. I just hated having coins and stuff in the
game. It just felt so wrong to me. And I did want the game to be deep and have
complexity, but I still wanted it to feel really raw and really pure. And by now, you're probably sensing a pattern
in how I approached the design for these early days of Fruit Ninja. I was fiercely protective of the core of Fruit
Ninja and had a very clear vision for how I thought the game should feel, and I never
really thought about the business side of things at all. I just wanted the game to be how I imagined
it should be. Earlier versions of arcade mode also had a
lot more information on the screen, such as a bar showing you how long the power-up bananas
would last. More and more, I stripped that back, making
it as simple yet as deep as possible, and I'm still insanely proud of how arcade mode
turned out. During these early days, there was also a
bunch of Fruit Ninja stuff that we made that no one ever saw. For example, we developed a medical version
of Fruit Ninja along with Neuroscience Australia that was to be used for a stroke rehabilitation
program in hospitals. We worked with a doctor to include modes to
make the game easier and even had functionality for exporting that data into the patient's
medical records. About two years later, sometime after the
pomegranate update, myself and my team, we were just cooked. We were so sick of working on Fruit Ninja. By this point, we had shipped a huge amount
of updates in the last 24 months and under immense pressure. But really, the main thing was I just didn't
have the will or the energy to keep working on Fruit Ninja by this point. Jetpack Joyride had also taken off, and that
was taking a lot of my focus and attention, and I just couldn't give Fruit Ninja the love
it deserved. And I was also more excited about developing
whatever the next new IP would be. So eventually, we worked out a plan and handed
off the entire Fruit Ninja project to another team at Halfbrick. And from there, the game has just kept going
and going and going. Handing the project off and letting go of
the creative control of Fruit Ninja was really hard for me. It was like my baby, and it was something
that I really loved. I deeply cared about this project. But at the end of the day, Fruit Ninja isn't
my baby. It's a product that's owned by a business. And so when the big changes started coming
in, of course, I didn't like that. It progressively transformed from what I wanted
it to be to what the business needed it to be, and that makes complete sense. But it still really was hard for me to watch
Fruit Ninja change. My career in a massive way. Soon after, I was promoted to Chief Creative
Officer. I got invited to speak at conferences and
even won a few awards. And realistically, it's the game that I will
always be known for. It's always going to be the top game on my
portfolio, right? There's no way that anything really can come
close to that level of success, although I guess Jetpack Joyride did get pretty close. What it didn't do, though, was make me rich. I think a lot of people just assume that I
owned Halfbrick Studios, not realizing that it was quite a big company. And at the end of the day, I was an employee. I got a bunch of pay raises and got a few
good bonuses, so that was great. But this wasn't like, "Oh, I can retire now"
money, not by any means. It was enough that I could put a deposit on
a mortgage, and this was kind of hard. When I quit Halfbrick to start Prettygreat
along with Phil and Hugh, we'd flown to San Francisco to GDC to try and get investors
to fund our new studio. And a lot of people were just like, "Why aren't
you funding it yourself? You've got all this Fruit Ninja money." People assumed we were living large and just
spending money like millionaires. But the reality was we were staying in a dorm
room in a hostel and paying for everything on our credit cards. When we did finally get funding for Prettygreat,
I had zero dollars in my bank account. But at the same time, Fruit Ninja got us into
the room with those investors. People knew who we were, and we had a reputation,
and that had huge value. So it's complicated. Fruit Ninja changed my life for my career
in a massive way, but not necessarily the way people expect all the time. The best part of the whole thing was how much
Halfbrick grew and how many new opportunities, especially for local developers, Fruit Ninja
created. And now, after 13 years, Fruit Ninja has been
worked on by so many people. There are many talented developers who have
all helped make it the phenomenon that it is today. But despite all that great stuff, there's
always that part of me that wanted Fruit Ninja to just be that single, pure, perfect idea. No compromises, no characters, no spin-offs,
no currency. Just that original little nugget of brutally
murdering fruit. This is about as good as I could do on this
story without making it about six hours long. There are so many details and other stories
involved, but it's just... This is already a long video, right? So thank you very much for watching. I don't want to spend too much time just looking
backwards, but if enough people like this video, then maybe I'll do a similar one about
Jetpack Joyride as well. If that sounds good to you, definitely leave
a comment, subscribe so you don't miss out. I have a new game that I'm working on called
"Feed the Deep." You should check that out on Steam and wishlist
it and all that jazz. And thanks to everyone that's been leaving
comments and questions about this for me. It really helped me form the basis for this
video. So yeah, thanks for watching. [Music]
