Yes, after I designed Fruit Ninja, I designed
Jetpack Joyride as well. This video took a long time to make because there's just so
much good stuff here: old concept sketches, photos of the team, screenshots of cut
features, a lot of which has never been seen by anyone outside of Halfbrick. It's a lot
to fit in, but I'm going to give it my best shot. If you haven't seen the 'How
I designed Fruit Ninja' video, let me quickly set the scene. It was 2009,
and I was running a small team of seven at Halfbrick Studios. Thanks to the global
financial crisis, the whole studio was in a precarious position. To top it off, the last game
I had designed sold like absolute garbage. So, we had an ultimatum. Our team had 12 months
to make $AUD300,000 or we were all out of a job. In Australia in 2009, there wasn't exactly much
chance of getting a game job anywhere else. The majority of game studios in Australia had
shut down or were on the ropes just like us. So, our team started working on two games at
once, both for the iPhone. We figured making two games gave us two chances at success (good math, Luke). One of these games was Fruit Ninja, and spoiler alert, Fruit Ninja saved the day. It created
a heap of new jobs, tie-ins, rip-offs, skits, and parodies. But Fruit Ninja wasn't our
only bet. It was such a huge hit that it's kind of easy to forget the other game, a game that
actually did pretty damn well in its own right and would eventually become the backbone of
Jetpack Joyride. That game was Monster Dash. So much of Jetpack Joyride’s
DNA is owed to Monster Dash that I think it deserves its own little chapter (and I get to decide because it's my video). The idea for Monster Dash was pretty simple. We
were going to make an endless runner in the style of Adam Saltsman's fantastic Canabalt, and just
add monsters and guns. This is not exactly a super inspired idea. It's much more derivative
than the starting point for Fruit Ninja… and it's only slightly disappointing after the success of Fruit Ninja to see
the studio playing it so safe. But this was on purpose. Fruit Ninja
was actually a hail mary, a risky bet, which is kind of hard to imagine now
given how well it all worked out. But Monster Dash was our safe option. At the
time, we were literally fighting for our jobs, our careers, and the studio. So we
were being as strategic as possible, trying to give ourselves the best odds of still
being employed during a global economic crisis. These are the first prototypes Joe Gatling
and I made for Monster Dash compared to the Fruit Ninja prototype, which was basically one
and done. We actually did a bunch of iteration on the Monster Dash prototype, doing lots of
experiments with the sizes of everything and how to generate levels. For the theme,
again with the idea of hedging our bets, we decided we should use an existing IP
and base the game around Barry Steakfries from one of Halfbrick's previously
successful games, Age of Zombies. The character of Barry Steakfries, originally
created by our marketing officer, Phil Larsen, and originally drawn by Murry Lancashire,
was a classic action hero type character with a bit of a potty mouth. The first line
ever spoken by Barry in his first game is, 'Surprise, Professor [___] for
brains.' I think that tells you just about everything you need
to know about Barry Steakfries. So, we threw Barry into our endless runner along
with a bunch of monsters to shoot. As we added more to the game, we figured we should also add
a bunch more weapons. We started with simple and obvious ones like a powerful revolver and an
Uzi, just normal stuff, I guess. As we added more weapons, we started to ramp up how crazy they
were, like the super powerful Mr Zappy. But we could go further. I forget who originally had the idea,
but we thought instead of just adding a weapon, we could add like a weapon plus vehicle combo,
and very specifically, we wanted the motorbike plus shotgun from Terminator 2. It just seemed
like it would fit Barry Steakfries perfectly. We made sure to include every detail, including
the reload action and the sparks as the bike hits the ground and bottoms out. Next, I thought,
what else could we do like this? What weapon could we come up with that's even more ridiculous? How
about a jetpack made out of machine guns, and the Machine Gun Jetpack was born. It was completely
absurd and instantly one of our favorite things about the game. In August 2010, four months
after we launched Fruit Ninja, Monster Dash was released, and it actually did pretty good. Like
this version of Monster Dash would end up selling over a million copies, but of course, it was
totally eclipsed by the world-beating Fruit Ninja. After the release, we did a couple of updates,
and then my team was switched around a little. It's kind of like a lot to try and explain
in this video because a lot was happening at the time. And while I was frantically working
on Fruit Ninja updates with Steve and Shath, I now had Adam Wood or Woody, as he was
known, and Sierra Asher waiting on me to decide what we would work on next.
For the first time, basically ever, we were in a very fortunate position where we
didn't need to worry about making money right away. The team's future was secured thanks to
Fruit Ninja. So my plan was, let's make something small and fast and just release it for free.
It would be like a big thank you to our fans, not really our next big game, more like a
bit of a breather, something just for fun. My idea was we could make a Monster Dash spin-off
starring the Machine Gun Jetpack. We would just hack up the game and make it so you were always
wearing our favorite weapon. Smash out the game in four weeks in time for Christmas. We already
had most of the art. Should be easy, right? So, one of my main goals here was to keep
the game as simple as possible and make it just one button. No extra buttons for jumping,
aiming, attacking, nothing. Just purely firing the jetpack. Opening up <the greatest prototyping tool of all time>, I started messing around with a prototype, a cave flying game essentially, riffing
on the old helicopter Flash game, except with power-ups. This is the original
prototype for Jetpack Joyride. I built this in a single day, and boy does it show.
I mean, look at how I spelled sheild. Mostly what I was learning here was how to
give the physics a good balance of floaty but responsive. If the game was too floaty, it
means you get frustrated that you can't get out of the way of obstacles fast enough. But
if you crank up the gravity and the jetpack power to make it more responsive, then you
spend all your time tapping the screen, making it hard to hold a position,
just generally being super tiring. The next day, I sent the prototype around the
whole company with a message saying that whoever gets the highest score at the end of the day
wins a chocolate bar. People absolutely started flooding me with scores, which was a pretty good
sign, I thought. I mean, sure, I was bribing people to play the prototype, but for a game that
was supposed to only take four weeks, that signal was good enough for me, and so production
began with the name of Machine Gun Jetpack. Our programmer, Woody, immediately got to
work setting up the game, hacking Monster Dash to shreds. This is a screenshot of the game
after three days of work. You can see we have a bunch of stuff in there already: obstacles to
avoid, coins to collect, Barry is wearing a hat because I wanted some kind of clothing system.
Oh yeah, and also, it looks like total [___]. So, this was the time for our artist, Sierra, to
start working on defining the look of the game, which ended up landing on a kind of mix between
Metal Slug with Mario proportions. Sierra had honed his pixel art skills during Halfbrick's
Game Boy Advance days, so he was already super proficient in this style. But one thing to know
about Sierra is that, other than just being an incredible artist, he also has low vision. So, the
way he described it to me was he essentially has only peripheral vision. Like if you put some small
text up on the screen and then look away from it, so it's only in your peripheral, and then you
try and read it, yeah, that's what it's like for Sierra all the time. But this is also kind of his
superpower. Using a zoom tool on old Windows XP, he could get super zoomed in on the pixel
art, and here he was able to work his magic. The pixel art was a great fit for him. There
were distinct edges and not much detail. Sierra would work on the game with the tiny sprites
ultra-zoomed in, making sure every pixel was perfect. I think you can really get a sense of
how careful and detailed his work was when you compare the Monster Dash sprites to the Jetpack
Joyride sprites. The level of detail he went into was unreal. Even these tiny little posters for
the lab are just so insanely well-drawn. I could spend hours just scrolling through these
old working files, studying the details. On the design side, for me, one big job was to
figure out how the procedural generation would work for the different obstacles and coin
patterns. The game used a lot of lessons we learned on Monster Dash about how to place
the obstacles and ride the fine line between impossible and much too easy. Fruit Ninja has
a slightly unfair system where bombs can be partially obscured by the fruit. Both Monster Dash
and Jetpack kind of have this same thing where you can just get these situations that are of outsized
difficulty. Monster Dash's implementation is actually pretty unsubtle, with the monsters that
would just pop up right in front of you. They were never impossible, to be clear, but sometimes
it was just like, 'What the [___] was that?' Just like in Fruit Ninja, that's on purpose. We
want the player to be able to assign some of the blame for dying on the game and not just wear it
on themselves. Jetpack Joyride’s a little more subtle as it comes down to a combination
of obstacle size, density, and spacing. So, I was designing all of this and then
getting Woody to implement it. Woody is such an outrageously fast programmer. Often, I was
scrambling to keep up with him. I would spend a few hours writing out how I wanted the level
generation to work and what kind of controls and ramping we would need. Then, like before I
had a chance to think about the next feature, he would just turn around to me and be
like, 'Okay, that's done. What's next?' Woody also has this astonishing ability where he
can somehow look at me and make eye contact while we discuss the design and program at the same
time. As we would discuss how a feature would work, he's looking me in the eye and touch typing
the code. I could never really get used to that. So, back on the design side, an interesting
thing about all our games at this point was they were all kind of an inevitable march
towards death (gameplay wise...mostly). There's no actual win condition other than getting a high score.
Like no matter what you do, you finish by dying or losing or hitting a bomb. So, it's
extra important to try and make dying fun. In Fruit Ninja, you got the little fruit facts
on the game over screen. Monster Dash had the same idea, plus there were some secret awards
you could unlock. But for Machine Gun Jetpack, I saw an opportunity to kick this up to a
whole another level. Originally, when you died, Barry just vaporized and turned into
dust. But to make death extra fun, we changed this to Barry kind of bouncing and
ragdolling in a way through the level. You could get a little bit further, and sometimes you
would even grab a few more coins along the way. Then, later, expanding on this same idea, we
added the slot machine where you got to have the chance of winning a bonus or even getting blown
further down the level. The overarching idea here was that it almost fades in death, if that makes
sense. Instead of it being just an instant boom, you died, game over, you had things to distract
you and get you ready for the next try. This thinking was extended to the results screen as
well. Over the entire development of the game, I spent so long iterating on and
refining this to try and make it as fun as possible. We added automatically
captured screenshots, stats, all sorts of stuff. But there was no actual editor in our game engine.
It wasn't like Unity where the designer can get in there and actually lay everything out. It all
had to be hardcoded in place. So, poor Woody would have to implement my designs and code basically by
hand, copying my terrible specs into the game. And then, like a week later, I would have changed
my mind and want another change. Woody always made the changes gladly, and honestly, having
someone who is that open to iteration is so empowering to the designer, even if I'm sure
he must have secretly been getting frustrated. Another idea I had was that the game should
start with a bang, give the player a big chunk of visceral feedback that would set them up for
the explosions and carnage to come. Before we had the iconic Barry explode through the wall start
sequence, Barry would actually burst through a window in the lab when you tapped the window.
But pretty quickly, we realized that we would need to have art of Barry facing forward,
and it also just felt weird to have Barry run towards the camera and then to the left and
then to the right (STAGE LEFT AND RIGHT). It didn't flow very nicely. So at this stage, we had already blown past
our original 4-week plan. We were about 6 weeks deep. It was coming up to Christmas 2010,
so we decided to give everyone at the company a copy of the game to play over their break
so that they could give us some feedback. This version of the game had the basics. You
could fly, dodge obstacles, get a good score, but there were no vehicles, no missions, not
even any scientists running around yet. The only power-ups in the game were ones that just
gave you some extra points. There was also this whole system where you could skim past obstacles
and get a close call bonus, which could combo up and get massive scores. It was supposed to be
a huge risk-reward mechanic, but as it was, consensus was that the game was just kind of
boring. And on top of that, the pressure was starting to build. The App Store landscape
was changing. Games were getting bigger and more featured. Releasing something so simple after
Fruit Ninja kind of started to feel like it would have a half-baked vibe. Like everyone was waiting
for what we would release after Fruit Ninja. So the game just wasn't ready. Breaking down
playtesters' feedback is always hard, and a lot of people told us that the game was boring. But this
is pretty ambiguous, right? Like, my initial read on this was that the game needed more variety in
order to be more interesting. So we actually spent a few weeks trying to add all kinds of different
power-ups to the game to make it more compelling. We had all the things you might expect, like
slow-mo or shield. It was pretty uninspiring, to be honest. These just didn't really work out.
The game still felt really flat and one-note. So after a few weeks of head-scratching, I
finally had a moment of inspiration. It wasn't just boring because it needed more things
on the screen. I mean, it needed that too, but that wasn't the only factor. It was boring
because the intensity of the game was always the same. Like, you were always exactly one hit away
from death. The game started off slow, ramped up, and then you were kind of like edge of your seat
until you died. Some intensity was good, but the game spent so long in this zone that it made
it feel especially one-note. So interestingly, the solution to the intensity problem is actually
related to the player's health. For example, if the game had three hearts instead of just one-hit
kills, then the intensity usually starts pretty chill and then ramps up every time you take a hit.
This is exactly how it worked in Monster Dash. So we tried just bringing this across. This did
change it up, but it wasn't the right solution. Next up, we actually tried a modern first-person
shooter method where when you take a hit, the edges of your screen get all red, and you've
got the heartbeat. You need to be really super careful not to take another hit right away.
This changed things a lot again, but still, it wasn't quite right. And then, once again,
looking back at Monster Dash, inspiration struck with the old badass hog power-up (this name changed many times). The brilliant
part of the hog as a power-up is not only does it add heaps of variety by changing the visuals and
the physics, it also acts kind of as a shield. And the whole part where you grab the hog and
the game slows down, and you do a big wheelie, this is such a nice break from the intensity
of the game. So we added the hog back, and immediately the game felt like it came
to life. The pacing just changed completely, and now you had all these intense stretches
of flying with your jetpack, and they would be punctuated by these exciting sequences where
literally everything changes: the controls, the visuals, the game speed, and most importantly,
the consequences. We knew we were onto something. So we started adding more vehicles. Up next was
the mech Lil Stomper. I wanted to try and add more complex one-touch controls here, so you could
actually jump and then hover a bit after your jump with a second touch. Initially, people died
a lot when transitioning between the vehicles and the normal game, so we added more explosions,
like the solution to all of life's problems, and these would clear the screen and give people
a moment to figure out the new controls again. We also added sequences of coins that would
teach the player how to use the vehicles. So, like, there's arrows for Gravity Man, and it acts
like a tiny tutorial built into the game to help you get recalibrated or remember how it feels. And
just like when we added weapons in Monster Dash, each vehicle we added to Machine Gun Jetpack just
got crazier and crazier. We added the Money Bird, which was gently and maybe not very subtly
poking fun at both Angry Birds and Tiny Wings. We added the Crazy Freaking Teleporter. And like
I mentioned before, we didn't have a modern game engine, so every little detail, every explosion,
every puff of dust, this was all done by Woody manually with Sierra and I crowded around,
literally looking over his shoulders and tweaking it together, variable by variable. We were proud
of the attention to detail and the subtle touches that gave the game its distinct feeling. We also
had to be careful with how many vehicles we added, though. Everyone had their favorite, and so if
there were too many, then it felt like you never got your favorite vehicle. But if there weren't
enough vehicles, then it kind of felt like you always got it, and then it stopped feeling
special. The vehicles really gave the game its own unique identity while fixing the pacing
and the intensity issues. I really think that this decision was possibly the most pivotal
one to Jetpack Joyride's eventual success. So I actually filmed all of this other footage
like a few weeks ago, and I was just out walking this trail, and I realized I forgot a section.
So I'm, like, let's just film it now. Basically, I just wanted to quickly say I'm not taking
sponsorships for my videos at the moment because instead of doing a sponsor segment, I'd
much rather tell you about the game I'm working on right now. It's called Feed the Deep. It's an
underwater roguelike. This is my first indie game since I quit my job, and I'm making it completely
solo. It's going to be out on Steam middle of next year. There's a link in the description. You
should check it out, wishlist it (seriously, please), and then I can keep making games, keep making videos, and all
that stuff (like buying food). So, yeah, thanks. Back to the video. Another one of the big things I wanted for this
game was for it to have a shop. So I mentioned in my Fruit Ninja video how I really wanted to avoid
having a shop and currency because it didn't feel right for Fruit Ninja, but here it was the
opposite. We had masses of coins and a slot machine. I wanted there to be all kinds of outfits
for Barry so the players could earn and buy, and also so they could express themselves.
But overall, I just wanted to give ourselves an option of making it super easy to update the
game. Like at the time, I was literally still in the middle of experiencing the pain of how hard
it was to update Fruit Ninja. So making this next game easy to update and add content to was top of
mind. Everything had to be built in an extensible way so we could keep on adding to the game
long-term as painlessly as realistically possible. I made a lot of concepts for how the
shop should look and work. At first, it was kind of like the Fruit Ninja menu, but it
slowly evolved. I really wanted to have flavor text and for the whole thing to have a bunch of
personality to it. When I started to get stuck, I looked for inspiration on the App Store. You
can see how these inspirations eventually carried over from the arrow icons to the sides to even
having the shine and emboss on the icons. We had so much fun adding things to the store. We even
added Phil. These were the reference photos I took of him with my iPhone 4, and then Sierra
turned that into the character in the game. We had a lot of fun putting ourselves into the game
in other places as well. Like as achievements, Woody's achievement was for just running
into the bottom zapper over and over because that's what he often did while
debugging parts of the game and testing things. And Sierra's was for just staring
at the shop screen, studying the details. All right, so we have to talk about the music.
I think most people can agree that the Jetpack Joyride theme song goes hard. But it was
actually a really long road to get there. The sound designer and composer for Jetpack
Joyride was Cedar Jones, and he had actually only just started at Halfbrick. In fact, he had
very little experience of making music tracks at this point. I feel sorry for how much he got
plunged into the deep end on this project. Phil and I would come into Cedar's studio and
listen to the tracks as we collectively tried to find the right style to start with. We just
had the original Monster Dash music by Jesse Higginson. This was in the game right from the
start just by default, seeing it was already in the branch from Monster Dash. So a lot of the
earlier music tests followed this same kind of vibe. This didn't really feel quite right to
us, but we couldn't quite put our finger on why. So next we suggested, let's try something
a bit more metal, like after all, the game is literally metal and explosions and guns. But
this isn't right either. I think the problem is that the game at its core is playful. Like sure,
it's like machine guns and explosions and labs, but as you're playing, you're like grabbing a
whole bunch of coins, and it just didn't seem to mesh quite right. After being stuck on this for a
while, we decided to try a little circuit breaker and have Cedar try to write some jazz. This worked
surprisingly well, and now you're starting to hear the elements that make up the final product. But
now, because it's an endless runner, we felt like it was lacking a beat to kind of drive it forward.
So we put the jazz thing on the side for a bit and asked Cedar to try a darker style with a beat.
This was nice but a bit too dark and not quite catchy enough. So then the next version sounded
like this. Okay, we're getting close, we thought. For the next step, we might funk it up a tad.
Okay, so this is very close to the final track, but it still had this kind of happy synth thing
that didn't fit quite right. So the next idea was to get this and then read back some of those
jazz elements from a few versions back. And I specifically remember the moment where Phil and
I were standing in Cedar's room and we heard this for the first time, and we all just kind of
looked at each other, and we were like, "Holy [__], that's it, done, perfect, ship it." It's
awesome listening back to all the old versions, you can kind of pick up all the elements along
the way that made the final track what it was. After actual months of experimenting, Cedar
absolutely knocked this out of the park. To date, it's still my favorite song of any game I've
ever worked on, and like, I legit think it's a serious contender for one of the best theme
songs on any mobile game. For sure. Okay, so by now the game was getting pretty
close to complete, but it was still missing something. I didn't know what yet, but it was
definitely something. And then in March 2011, I was flying to GDC, and I spent, like, half of my
14-hour flight just playing the latest iPhone hit, Tiny Wings. It was amazing. I loved it.
And one of the things I really liked was the neat little missions it would give you to
upgrade your nest multiplier. But it was pretty far from perfect. For one, you would often
get stuck with just a single mission to do, and that would be super difficult. And until you
cleared that, there was no progress to be made. When I got home from GDC, I took this inspiration
and started messing around with a mission system for Machine Gun Jetpack, trying to extend
on Tiny Wings' starting point but having the player not get stuck so often and making it
feel much more rewarding. The first idea that popped into my mind was to have a set of three
missions every day. There would be an easy, a medium, and a hard one. So that way you
could never get stuck for more than a day, and there would always be a goal to work toward.
We tried this, and the immediate problem was that if you started playing a few days after your
friends, you could probably never catch up. The next idea was, instead of having three
missions to complete, you had two, and you just had to complete one mission or the other.
So one of them would be a skill-based mission, but the other one would be something you could
just grind out over time. But this felt grindy, like unsurprisingly, and only ever completing
one mission at a time was just a bit boring. So finally, we went with, there are three
missions, but the big difference was that every time you finished a mission, a new one would
slide in. This way you would hopefully never really get stuck and also maximized the chances of
completing more than one mission in a single run, which always felt great. Next, we had to
figure out the progression and rewards system for completing the missions, like, what
was your actual reward for doing these missions? I didn't want to do a multiplier like in
Tiny Wings because I felt like this meant you couldn't really actually compare your
distances with your friends. I wanted the score to be literally how far did you go, not
something arbitrary like "I got <over 9,000> points." So one thing I tried for the rewards was
this idea that every mission you completed, you could pick between the money or the box. You
would either get a bunch of coins or an item, and the items were like literally these totally
useless collectibles, just cards to collect, I guess you'd say? They were totally absurd
and varied from a lump of coal to an entire Hawaiian island. Again, this didn't quite work
out because everyone always wanted the box, and no one ever took the coins, or you can trade it
all in for what's in this box. The box, the box. But ultimately, the items in the box had no real
value, and I couldn't figure out a way to make them interesting without making some other entire
collectible card game that would sit on top of it. So the next evolution of this is just the classic
experience point system, where you would get XP for completing missions. Leveling up felt really
nice, and then you would get some coins as a bonus as well. But bars filling up didn't feel
quite right for the game either. Eventually, we landed at the super crunchy every mission is
one, two, or three stars, and stars just slam into place with particle effects and sounds and
all that good stuff. And after that, it was just like a lot of tweaking and iteration. I'd play
through the entire mission system every single morning for weeks, making changes and tweaking
it for balance, cutting missions entirely, adding new ones, changing the order, trying to
get it just right. And now, all of a sudden, the game is addictive. Like you have so many
goals. There's social goals- I want to beat my friend's. Status- I want to level up I'm
currently level 231 (next time check the footage before making up numbers). Personal goals- I want to get the top hat. So many layers of feedback and
reward all overlapping with each other. In total, we had spent three months just to get the
mission system done at this point. So like three times longer than the entire
original budget for the whole game. The very last thing I wanted to add was a way
to make the mission system replayable. We added the idea of prestiging, just like copied
straight from Call of Duty Modern Warfare, where you would grab a badge and just start the
missions again. But instead of just progressing through the badges linearly, we decided to
have these semi-random badges that you could collect. They were made up of five colors,
five outer shapes, and five inner shapes, for a total of 125 possible badges. We assumed
people would just like maybe collect one or two at most. So we thought it would be a good
idea to number and name every badge. This way, the community could try and collect all
125 together and build the list of every possible badge. A lot of the badge names were
just default based on the color and shapes, but a bunch of them had unique overrides with
special names. Like badge number four was named the Quadruple Badge of Bypass because my father
had just undergone quadruple bypass heart surgery. At this point, the game was more or less done.
But we still had a few surprises to deal with to get the game out the door. Since we had been
working on the game, both retina displays and the iPad had been released. The game had great
pixel art, but on a brand new iPad, for example, it was just too big a screen, and the game now
looked overly blocky. We couldn't just make bigger assets because at the time, games had to
fit in under 20 megabytes, or people could only download them over Wi-Fi, which was a pretty
major disadvantage (from memory it dropped sales ~40%). So we came up with an idea, with the inspiration once again coming from
our experience making Game Boy Advance games. So when we made GBA games, we used to often
test them on an emulator, and people would turn on these inbuilt scalers that made the games look
better at high resolution on our computer monitors but still maintaining a crisp pixel art look.
There was a well-known image scaling filter called hqx. Internally, we called them the super sexy
filters. It was actually company policy to never use these filters when testing our own GBA games
because it would stop us from seeing how the game would actually look on a final GBA screen. But
here it actually seemed like a perfect solution. So Woody built a system where, after downloading
the game when you run it for the first time, it would select specific sprites and run them
all through a custom hqx scaler he'd written. And then these would be saved to the device. This
way, we could have large, crisp sprites that would never have actually fit inside the 20 MB limit
because it all got done locally on the device. The scaled sprites looked amazing as well because
Sierra had made everything the way we used to for the Game Boy Advance with really limited palettes
and every texture being a power of two <also only punchout alpha>. This had previously just been a stylistic choice, and now
it really helped save the day on how to make the game look as good as possible on every device. We
actually had to do the same thing in reverse for some other assets, such as menu items, scaling
them down so that the game would always run at a smooth 60 frames per second on older devices,
such as the iPhone 3GS. It even ran at 30, if you can believe it, on the iPod Touch
2, which was like an ancient device even at the time. So the game ran at 60, looked
great on all of the different devices that had just been released. Also, it fit in
under 20 megs. We were ready to release. So at this point, the game was still called
Machine Gun Jetpack, and just like the music beforehand, this now felt like too much of an
action hero metal name compared to where the gameplay actually landed. The big thing that made
us realize this was actually when we worked on the icon. We couldn't fit the whole name on the iPhone
screen. We had to shorten it to MGJP, which just looked kind of lame. Even the icon was still about
being the jetpack, and the game was so much more than that. Right now, Phil and I knew this was
an issue that we had to resolve before release, but the problem was we'd already announced
the name. It was at the start of trailers, it was even on signs at sponsored events, a lot.
So we figured if we're going to change the name, what's the smallest possible change we could
make? And at one stage during brainstorming, we seriously considered the
name Machine Fun Jetpack. Like, Phil and I both convinced each other
that this was a genius idea. We made the name more casual and fun, literally. The
branding could still basically be the same. The next day, we walked into work and both just
said, 'What the [__] were we thinking? We can't call it that. That's horrible.' After a
lot more workshopping and roping in many more people in the company, we eventually
landed on the final name, Jetpack Joyride, which in retrospect is a fantastic name I
think. Thank God we didn't go with Machine Fun Jetpack. And with that, we were done. We'd
spent 10 months working on a one-button game. We were exhausted, and we pressed the
launch button on September 1st, 2011. On the first day of launch, the game was off
to a flying <GOOD PUN LUKE GG> start. Phil had been building a comprehensive marketing campaign for quite
a while and had been super involved with the project throughout development, so this gave
the game a really strong start. It quickly jumped into the top 50 games chart. We had a huge
launch party the next day. The whole company, maybe like 50 of us at the time, went out
to a Korean barbecue place. When we left, the game was sitting at maybe number 10 or
so. Woody's wife, Charmaine, had made a huge Barry Steakfries cake. It was a blast. And
then, midway through dinner, Phil jumped up on his chair and screamed out that we had just
hit number one on the App Store in Australia. Everyone just went completely crazy. Like, I
still get goosebumps thinking about that moment. Over the coming months, the game went from
strength to strength. We smashed out updates as fast as we could while at the same time,
I also was working on Fruit Ninja updates. It was exhausting but exhilarating. And as the end
of the year approached, Jetpack Joyride started picking up awards. Among these was the Game of
the Year from Pocket Gamer. I was on stage to receive this award, along with our community
manager, James Schultz. I managed to lift up the award that was made of glass straight into
the champagne bottle that James was holding, and it exploded all over us right on stage. It
felt so incredible for the game to both sell well and be so warmly received by so many
players. We got so much fan mail and fan art posted in from all over the world.
We were so proud of what we had made. I spent almost another 2 years working on Jetpack
Joyride, and our team released another 13 updates. These included things like the gadget system,
Flash the dog, which had a trailer that starred many of our own dogs. The Wave Rider vehicle,
which Sierra actually designed and then built the prototype for in Game Maker on his own to
prove the concept. And then almost 3 years after we'd started on Jetpack, just like with Fruit
Ninja, I was burned out. I'd been juggling so many jobs and so many responsibilities for so
long. I could no longer give this game my best. We went through a lengthy process of handing
the game off to another team so that we could have a breather but also switch our attention
to making more original IP for the studio. Jetpack has now had, like, I don't
know how many downloads, a billion or something. The game has shifted and evolved
over time, was integrated with other brands, and just generally changed like many successful
games do. And although it's a different beast now, Jetpack 1.0, I think will always
be the game I'm most proud of. There is actually so much more I
haven't mentioned here. For one, there were a lot of other people that
contributed along the way, such as Jas (Jason Harwood), our incredible producer, who has just like
enabled us to do all of this amazing work. Brent (Hobson) with the amazing QA team. Shainiel (Deo), my
boss. Making games is complex and involves a lot of people and a lot of contributions.
So whenever I tell a story like this, I try really hard to make it accurate and include
credit for everyone. But at some point, like, it's unrealistic to really include every single
contribution. I really do try my best, though. I also didn't get a chance to talk about stuff
like all the little secrets and touches and details we added, the kick-ass trailer, all
the asynchronous card-based multiplayer that we even made but was obviously never released.
There's just so much good stuff here. Hell, I think I could do like a 20-minute long
video where I just sit down with Cedar and we go through all of the music track drafts in
detail. If any of that sounds interesting to you, be sure to hit subscribe, like, comment, all that
jazz. Be sure to watch the Fruit Ninja video as well if you haven't already, which goes into
a bit more detail about what happened after I made those games and kind of how it impacted my
career and what happened when I left Halfbrick. I also want to extend a huge thanks to
Sierra, Woody, and Phil, especially not only for like putting up with my [__] for all
those years at Halfbrick but also for being very generous with their time. They helped
me check this video. They read the script, and they're just amazing colleagues and friends
as well. So yeah, that's the end of this one. This is definitely an epic. I'm really not looking
forward to doing the edit for this thing because, oh my God, it's going to be a monster. I swear
to God, if any of this video hasn't recorded correctly or if the audio is scuffed up or
something, I'm going to lose my damn mind. Also, I have a Patreon now. I've been posting
quite a lot of stuff as I've been working on this video, like a little segment on kind of how
I set up for filming and kind of like doing deep dives on the Monster Dash trailer. I did like
a let's play of the Jetpack Joyride prototype. If you feel like supporting, I mean, that
would be fantastic. I'd love to have you along for the ride. And I mean, hey, it's taken
a while, but I think this video is finally done.
