Bullfrog 2

Bullfrog exceeded all my expectations. Even though it was only supposed to be a learning project and was developed with a tiny budget, downloads have been non-stop since it made its way on to the big Mac download websites.

Watching as the high scores have gotten higher and higher over time and reading all the extremely positive feedback has been feeding the game developer monster inside of me.

Finally, I can’t resist any longer. I’ve decided to begin development on the sequel to my little arcade game. But, this time the plan is a little different.

Take Two

The first time around I didn’t know any Objective-C or Cocoa, had a budget of almost zero, and developed the entire game from scratch.

Bullfrog 2 will benefit from all the experience I earned the first time through, an existing code base, a larger media budget, an existing user-base, and a new development partner.

Marcus Zarra and I thought it would be fun to team up and develop Bullfrog 2 together as a joint venture between Outer Level and Zarra Studios.

Sharing the Journey

Neither of us are real “game developers”, so we’ll be working through some interesting challenges on the way to releasing Bullfrog 2.

With this in mind, we’ve decided that sharing the design and development process on our blogs would be fun and hopefully interesting to gamers and fellow indie developers.

Bullfrog 2 is still very early in the design stage, but we already know some of the challenges we’ll be facing.

The first Bullfrog engine was built entirely in Objective-C and Cocoa and had some “interesting” performance challenges. One of the early design decisions I made was to avoid using OpenGL so I would not have to learn two entirely new frameworks to get the project completed.

This time around, one of the big goals is to migrate the rendering engine to OpenGL. We hope that this decision will lead to some huge performance benefits that will allow us to add new fun game-play features.

So we’ll probably have much to say on the OpenGL switch along with other technical hurdles we’ll likely face.

Stay Tuned

If you are interested at all about game development on the Mac, look for articles coming down the pipe about all things Bullfrog 2: design, development, brainstorming, and marketing.