Me and few others have recently posted some “Dismount Moments” photos to Facebook, as seen here for an example. These images originate from the all-new Stair Dismount, created for iPhone and iPod touch. It is of course a direct successor to the original Stair Dismount released in 2002. The game has been submitted for Apple’s approval to the App Store, so it should be available for purchasing quite soon (just a few weeks). Here’s a short introduction of what the new game is all about…
The game has now several different stair scenarios (six for the initial release), rather than just one like in the original. You can also use your friends face – either from photo library or directly from Facebook.
The ragdoll, Mr. Dismount, is now simulated better than ever and the graphics have been sweetened to something completely different when compared to the barren look of original Dismount series. There’s a simple screenshot button to create your own Dismount Moments. Sharing the images has been made really easy: simply save to photo library, email to your friend right away, or send it to Facebook, with automatic tagging of your friend if you picked a face from Facebook to start with. ;-)
We also worked countless of iterations with the user interface, tweaking small but important nuances. The hit position can simply be changed by touching (or touch-dragging on) the ragdoll. Camera view is simply controlled by touch-dragging from the border areas of screen (i.e. when starting to drag outside of the ragdoll), and zooming is done using the pinch gesture.
Sweet background music is made by Jonne Valtonen (Purple Motion). The sound effects have been painfully (literally) foley-recorded, tweaked, adjusted and mixed by Tuukka Savolainen, who has also drawn the sweet graphics for the game. Our platform code as well as some other parts were made by Mikko Lehtonen, and some nice visual enhancements were coded by Mikko Mononen. Jani Kahrama was the producer and is also behind the level design and 3d models. Yours truly (Jetro Lauha) is behind the original concept and acted as the lead programmer. I especially also want to thank Sara Kapli, who was very supportive and e.g. helped me with making reference lighting for some scenarios, of which some also made it to the final product without much modifications.
Finally, big thanks to authors of Irrlicht Engine and Open Dynamics Engine which were a big help in developing this product. There were many other open source libraries as well and I did my best listing them in the about text inside the game.
Touch Arcade was quick to act and they already wrote up a nice preview piece about the game.