Hey all,
I’ve just recently completed my first iphone game, and it’s been quite a ride. Huge thanks to everyone who helped me along the way. I’m in the big Apple submission queue, so twiddling my thumbs and prototyping some ideas while that happens. I thought someone might be interested in the progression of the game over time, so decided to do it in screenshots and videos as I used to take daily caps/videos to track my progress visually 
I used agile/Scrum for development, even though I worked alone on this project, I still find it helps to have some discipline when it comes to project management.
Week 1 - Workflow setup/Prototyping initial ideas
Not much to show here visually, mainly just ironing out workflow problems between blender, unity and zbrush. Eliminating risk etc. Also testing beast lightmapping setups, and setting up asset server, svn, dropbox and pivotal tracker management stuff. Prototyped a bunch of ideas on paper and in unity, each taking roughly a few hours to code together, using box and sphere placeholders.
Week 2 - Prototype development/Character style development
With the winning prototype chosen, I start playing with ideas for characters. I thought an anime inspired low-poly girl would be cute. During the week, I also fully rigged and animated her in blender, as well as flesh out her texture in zbrush. I’m a programmer by trade, but I like to give the art stuffs a bash.
Week 3 - Camera and Touch controls
Worked a lot on developing the initial prototype, so the gameplay felt a little more fun. Decided the ‘touch to target’ thing worked nicely.
Week 4 - Enemy Development/OpenFeint Tests
I wanted a mutant spider theme so decided to work on the enemy concepts a bit. Also integrated OpenFeint into unity 3 beta, but after some user testing, it felt really unresponsive on the 3g hardware. Made the call, to roll my own leaderboards and provide achievements as a Game Center update later.
Week 5 - Environment Creation
I wanted the environment to be based in Tokyo, so I chose Shibuya Crossing as my reference and modelled and textured a very low poly version of it. I baked in all the lighting details using beast. Also started messing around with different lighting textures on the character and enemies. StarCraft II also launched this week, productivity down ;_;
Week 6 - Initial GUI and Gameplay Flow
Not much to show this week, just a lot of background support code, initial gui test for player controls. Worked on some graphical blood effects as well, but not too happy with them. The new Unity beta (b6 I think) release was causing me some grief this week regarding audio crashing on device, but I submitted some bug reports and soldiered on.
Week 7 - Gameplay Flow
Continued to work on the game flow, and visual style and started to think about the game as a whole, from title to ending. It was intended for the game to be a bit of a 5 minute time waster, so I wanted to keep the flow really simple.
Week 8 - UI and Weapon Selection
More UI stuff, and also completed the 5 different weapons that will be in the game, as well as all their graphical effects. Also started on a second pass pollish on the placeholder gui. Messing around with some cheap hair physics.
Week 9 - Sound Effects, Graphical Effects, Fake Lighting, Leaderboards, Logo design and UX
It’s pretty strange, but I got so carried away with implementing everything I forgot to take a daily screenshot. I signed up to ibetatest.com which worked out nicely for finding testers. Also added some quick tutorial stuff for new players. I did manage to take a video to capture the state before the beta though. Also licensed a great chiptune from Sabrepulse to use in the game.
Week 10 - Beta Feedback and Additional Pollish
Got some great feedback from everyone who played it, I’m not a fan of positive feedback, unless it’s of the general sort, so some of the negative stuff was like golddust for me. Hopefully my changes I implemented because of it are for the better. These changes included texture changes, gameplay speed changes and a little improvement in the flow and a few ux fixes, like bigger controls. Also managed to get my mits on an iphone4 and ipod touch 3rd gen, so finally able to implement image effects on supported devices - ace!
Submission Day - Marketing material and some ‘last minute’ additions \o/
Noob-tip: make sure you actually finish your game before you start making marketing material like videos etc. I forgot to add the moon prop, and also bake shadows into my environment so I had to basically do the same task twice XD Finally submitted Last Minute Hero after some final device compatibility testing at 4:30am hurrah \o/ Here’s the old promo video I quickly through together the other day, still compositing the newer one as it takes half a day on my antique laptop, with the updated gameplay footage.
Looking forward to my next project using Unity