Sponsored Feature: Creating Castle Conflict

While the iPhone couldn’t be considered a safety net for game developers in these uncertain times, it’s an avenue of opportunity that many are looking to when their jobs look to be on shaky ground.

Couple this with the fact that so many people within the industry have been carrying around ideas for a number of years without being able to get a studio to listen to them, and turning to the App Store becomes quite a practical solution.

Just ask Broken King’s Stephen Gazzard.

“Before I started Broken Kings, I had worked at a couple of indie game studios,” Gazzard begins. “I had a few ideas of my own, and knew that the company I was currently working at was going to be downsizing in the near future, so I started to plan for what I would do following my work there.

"There were some game ideas I had that I wanted to make a reality, and I figured I would try and do those before moving on to my next job. I decided to take a week break and make a game that I knew I could complete in a short period of time: that game was Castle Conflict.”

There are stories of millionaires and paupers encamped around the App Store castle, and while Gazzard clearly wasn’t blinded by the iPhone gold rush he could finally see the parallel roads of his game ideas and the opportunity to make them converging at a junction.

It’s no small decision, going it alone, even when the ground beneath your job is starting to get a bit shaky. But just like the knights in Castle Conflict understand, sometimes the only way to do it is to charge in with sword swinging. Or with keyboard swinging, in Stephen’s case - you get the idea.

“The other key member of the Castle Conflict team is Josiah Tobin. Josiah and I have made games together for years now, but never professionally, and never for the iPhone, so this was a brand new step for us that we both really enjoyed.”

Castle Conflict dips its toe in the popular castle and tower defence genres that are rife on the App Store, but is careful not to plunge into the deep pool of games already out there. Instead, it takes a different tack and pits you one-on-one against another stronghold-owner as you push your conquest ever forward.

The face-to-face nature of Castle Conflict is one of the game’s secret weapons, as it creates a prevailing tension around even the smallest of matters, like sending out a gatherer to chop down a tree.

Each tree that’s successfully foraged from the no-man’s-land between the two castles increases your resources, allowing knights, cannons, dogs, missiles, and even witches to be thrown against the crumbling fortress of your opponent.

“Castle Conflict was inspired mainly by an indie PC game called Medieval Clash, which I had been aware of for years and came back to every once in a while,” continues Gazzard. “I knew that there was a lot of potential in that style of gameplay, and had been itching to try and make a game like it for the iPhone for some time.”

It’s not just a matter of hacking down as many trees as possible, though. Your tactics must be based around preventing the opponent from shoring up their resources, either by intercepting their gatherers or by sending in thieves to rob the goods from your opposing citadel and use them to build your own offences.

This creates a constant cross and change of wealth, which is ultimately what guides these two competing war machines.

“There are two things that we have really emphasised in our newer updates to keep the game different from those: the importance of resources, and really interesting unit interactions,” Stephen explains.

“Because we don't use hit points in our game, but instead have units simply win or lose based on their strength against the enemy unit, in order to add new units we have had to come up with new ways the players can interact within the rules of the game.

"I think this has led to some really interesting, unique units, such as the tree-planter, the bomber, and the witch, that you might not see in these other games.”

And he makes a good point. Early reactions to the game were very positive (enough to grab Apple’s attention and get Castle Conflict on the App Store’s front page Featured slot) but it was clear from user feedback that players wanted more.

This kicked off Broken King’s quest to deliver increasingly diverse units to the game, which offer far more adventurous and unique ways to do battle. Since the campaign mode was added along with the steady stream of new units, Castle Conflict has begun building a growing, and loyal, fan base.

While it’s great to have a legion of rabid fans chomping at the bit, keeping up with the improvements has proven to be a difficult, yet rewarding, task for the two developers.

“In our most recent update, we reached the point where we had to increase the size of our textures in order to support our units. Furthermore, we also added another skin that the player could choose to use instead of the default skin. This had the unfortunate side effect that our game could no longer afford to pre-load as much as it could before, and we had to spend the better part of four days rewriting how the app dealt with memory.”

No small task, but it’s great to see an iPhone developer spending an appropriate amount of time getting a game fully working, rather than attempting to fix it on the fly. All of which is clearly paying off, as Castle Conflict is noticeably improving with each expansive update.

But what else is to come?

“We have local multiplayer now, of course, but that is limiting in that you need a friend who has an iPhone or iPod touch, and Castle Conflict. So adding real online-multiplayer is definitely something that we want to do in the near future.

"As far as OpenFeint or social networking goes, if it’s something that our users want we’ll most likely put it in, but so far we have been concentrating more on making the game as good as it can be,” Gazzard says.

Broken Kings is likely to get exactly that kind of feedback from Castle Conflict’s players very quickly, as the studio has been very open to suggestions from its fans and even has a live updates section built right into the game to keep players posted on future upgrades.

Maintaining a close relationship with the end user is vitally important, especially on a platform as fickle as the iPhone.

Gazzard agrees.

“We owe a large debt of gratitude to our users,” he says. “When the original Castle Conflict was released, it was featured by Apple, and while that didn't make us rich, it meant we had enough money to actually spend some real time developing updates for the app.

"Since it’s our users who gave us this ability to spend our time working on a project that we really love, we really want to give back to them by letting them be involved in the future direction of the game, as much as possible.”