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But, generally speaking, the cross-platform groundwork laid on Hurricane paid off, and the port to Android went relatively smoothly.

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This isn't to say there weren't challenges on the code side (see 'What Went Wrong'). He was able to port over all of our water, wave, and Bullet physics code as written from the 360 with little or no modification. Vector Unit owns all the technology we developed for Hurricane, so when we began work on Riptide GP in early January, we were able to hit the ground running with a full-featured, cross-platform engine that allowed me to begin content development on the PC as Ralf worked on porting the low-level stuff over to Android's NDK.Īs I began prototyping our first vertical slice, Ralf quickly found that the Tegra 2's CPU was fully up to the task of handling the calc-intensive fluid dynamics simulation he'd used on Hurricane. It simply would not have been possible to make Riptide GP in the time we had without Hydro Thunder Hurricane. Knowing what was coming, we allowed ourselves a little break for the holidays, and at the start of January 2011 we dove headfirst into our studio's second game - a futuristic jet ski racer called Riptide GP. So throughout December we hammered out deal terms, and with NVIDIA's help we managed to cobble together funding (more on this later). It would be hard work, but it sounded like fun. On the bright side, we'd planned on porting our engine to Android at some point, and this would be an opportunity to create one of the first games developed specifically for high-end tablets and phones. And the schedule was aggressive - first playable by February, finished game by May.Īn early shot from Alpha City, right after the MWC demo in March. The budget was tight - we'd have to scrounge up investment for most of the development costs and cover the difference ourselves. We had no idea what the Tegra 2 hardware was really capable of, or if it would even be possible to pull off the kind of water physics and effects we'd developed for Hurricane on the 360. Neither of us had ever worked on a mobile game. The deal wasn't exactly what we'd been looking for, and the challenges sounded formidable. Someone there had played Hurricane, and wanted to know if we could build something similar for them. The chip maker was moving into the Android phone and tablet markets with its dual-core Tegra 2 processor, and it was looking for games to showcase the new hardware's capabilities. Then in early November we got a surprise call. The question of what to do next began to feel urgent. In October I wrapped up work on the Tempest Pack, Ralf was still contracting at EA, and we still had no clear second project on the horizon. It soon became clear that self-funding a second title would not be an option, at least not any time soon. Reviews were solid and it was well received by players, but sales - although good by general XBLA standards - weren't as off-the-charts as we'd hoped. For one thing, publishers tended to think of us as a 'racing game studio', and with some recent high-profile flops in the racing genre, there wasn't a huge appetite for new racing games. We had some great new concepts that we thought were sure to get picked up by somebody, given what we thought was a pretty solid freshman effort, but nothing had stuck. Since it didn't require a lot of engineering work, Ralf Knoesel, my co-founder and our lead programmer, took a contract at EA Visceral Studios to work on Dead Space 2 while we continued to pitch Microsoft and other publishers on new projects. We still had a little income coming in via the Tempest Pack DLC for Hurricane it was enough to keep me and one contract artist busy through the summer.

Early reviews were good, and sales projections indicated we'd be in royalties before the end of the year. We'd just wrapped up development on our first game, Hydro Thunder Hurricane, on time and on budget, and were preparing to launch it in one of XBLA's coveted Summer of Arcade slots. In June of 2010, the team at Vector Unit was feeling cautiously optimistic.