In this month’s Developer Feature series, we are honored to have Mr Garion Goh, a 38 year old veteran; Game Designer/Founder of Apptivise (a Microsoft BizSpark startup) to share with us on his journey of App development.

Well, I founded another company before Apptivise, called Ectivise, and “Ective” is a combination of “Eco” + “Active”. We added the suffix “-ise” to make  “Ective” into a verb, denoting action, which also carries the meaning of “to make or become”, as in materialise, realise, etc, and so it becomes Ectivise; we want an active and vibrant company.

So, when I started down the path to focus on App development, Apptivise came naturally from Ectivise.

We actually have a short illustrated history of LINX on our website.

The short of it is that we initially wanted to do a city-building game but we realised that we will not have enough time to finish it (before windows 8 launch). Good thing is that we already have a simple prototype built (by that time) which we are using to test out the puzzle mechanics for the city-building. And as I fiddled with it over the weekend, I realised that it can actually become a game all on its own and we started down that path, which resulted in the LINX you see today.

A lot of things happened by “serendipity” in my life and the development process tends to mirror that. Just like how we “stumbled” upon LINX as a puzzle game, a lot of the features and mechanics happens as we move along. I think some people called this “Emergent Design”.

This doesn’t mean that we dun know where we are headed, but as we move along day-by-day, we kept looking at what we have and make small adjustments here and there and before you know it, it no longer looks like what we imagined we’ll be doing when we first started.

And of course, there are those “3am in the morning” moments when things just drop into you.

It is a fun and dynamic process and I believe if you love what you are doing, the inspiration will come. Inspirations tend to dry up very fast when one is just trying to meet a deadline.

The most “feedback-ed” thing we got from users actually “color-blindness” or rather the lack of support or feature for our color-blind audience. It is something very dear to my heart because one of our co-worker is colorblind also and when we do internal testing, I witness for myself first hand how difficult it is for him to figure out what we take for granted,

But we just never got around to resolving it.

But, you see, LINX is as much a game about blocks and puzzle as it is about color. Color is a basis of what LINX is and the original marathon mode will just spawn one color after another, endlessly.

This endlessness works because color can be dynamically generated and assigned to each block, as in, we are not using any bitmap for the graphics of the blocks. And since there are 16.7 million colors that can be represented on your average PC in code, we really do have an “endless” supply.

If we swap out this dynamic generation and replace it with bitmaps so that they can be visually distinctive regardless of color, then we break this “endlessness” as there is no way we can package 16.7 million bitmaps into a game, not to mention the impossibility of coming out with 16.7million visually distinct block design.

Of course, we dun actually have 16.7 million colors today as we are still working on a proper algo to not only generate the colors (which is simple enough), but to generate them sequentially in a visually complementing and yet contrasting manner, kind of a continuous palette, so we stored more than 200 sequence of colors which are painstakingly arranged by hand by our dear programmer/designer, Angela; And 200 bitmaps is still a lot of work (for our small studio).

There are some other alternatives at the back of my mind which we hope to implement soon in a near future release, so I hope that will at least partially address the difficulty of our color-deficient brethren in playing LINX (when it is out), and at the same time, retain the “flavour” of LINX.

My own skillsets are largely Microsoft throughout my career so choosing Microsoft is natural for me in that aspect. But it is really programs like BizSpark, that allow startups like us to have a chance to make it, while having access to full-fledge commercial quality software from the start, like Ultimate edition of Visual Studios, that really sealed our partnership with Microsoft.

It saved us a lot of money. It also happens that the MS guys that I come across throughout my career has always been very helpful and provided the right support at the right time. Maybe it is the serendipity thing again.

3 months, with 2 programmers and myself doing the design.

I really like the metro design, clean cut and all. And we also did some research and we realised that without substantial marketing, our app will be drowned by dozens upon dozens of releases on Android or Apple store everyday.

So when Neng Gin asked if we could come out with something for Windows 8 in time for its launch, we readily took up the challenge. And I really believe that LINX will get nowhere close to its 18,000 downloads if it was launched on other platforms since we basically spent zero on marketing. Also, having a clean sheet to work from, kind of let us see what our game can do just on its own without all the marketing clouding the numbers and that really gave us the confidence that we can do well with our new release with proper marketing.

Submitting the app itself is really straight forward, but the certification or verification process was a bit challenge at first. We first had to deal with technical and design compliance issues brought up by WACK even though our app was running well (not crashing) in the debugger. In this area, MS PFE is really helpful and we manage to get thru this stage pretty fast and never had any issues since.

The one remaining sole point is in the certifications and game rating and countries, where up till today we are still facing a bit of problem when trying to add new markets, even though we thought we had the proper certifications and all. To be fair, there are only 5 countries where this is an issue, but 2 of them are actually key markets, like Taiwan and Korea.

As far as I know, the other platforms does not seems to have this problem or at least I didn’t hear much about them, so while I understand Microsoft stands to compile to local regulations, I hope the process can be further smoothen out.

I’ve always worked with Visual Studio which is really only possible because of programs like BizSpark. Though there are free versions of VS available, nothing beats having access to advanced functions like Code Coverage and the Profiler in VS2013 when it matters most – at crunch time.

Other than VS, Excel is probably a game designer’s best friend, since we need to do a lot of hypothetical calculations and game balancing. Being able to see whether a +3% accumulated over 20 levels would unbalance the game without actually having to touch any code is super helpful.

Don’t have much of any tips or tricks to share per se; Just believe in what you do but always keep an open mind for alternate ideas because no matter how good a developer one become, one cannot know everything.

I hug my daughter’s teddy bear to sleep every night. But seriously, I do have a soft spot for soft toys and have bought too many for my 2-year old; Maybe it helps to remind me that the world is softer than it seems.

Game on. As far as we can, we want to continue to make games that people enjoy and will come back to, even after a long time. No astounding graphics or epic cinematic, (not that I have anything against them. I really enjoyed the goods ones, like those from Final Fantasy, Mass Effect and Diablo), but just pure, simple gameplay that young and old can enjoy.

Just drop me an email: gariongoh@apptivise.com. I’m always happy to meet up with like-minded people if you happened to be in town.

In the mean time, please try out the app here!

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