Tilt to Live is a deceptively simple game. Designed for the iPhone, it allows players to control an arrow onscreen by tilting the device. The arrow must avoid waves of red dots to survive.
Earning the game dozens of rave reviews are the seemingly endless fun details and bits of personality and humor. The arrow can pick up an armory of weapons to slay the marauding dots, which turn and flee when faced with nuclear bombs or spikes.
“Stop reading this review and get it. Get it now,” urged the editors of iphoneappreviews.net, sharing a common sentiment.
Alex Okafor, CS 09, programmed the game with help from an artist friend. Okafor had developed the rough idea of Tilt to Live while at Tech. He said a video game design course taught by Jeff Wilson, CS 99, MS CS 01, and Maribeth Gandy, CmpE 98, MS CS 99, both research scientists in the Interactive Technology Media Center, sealed his fate as a game designer. [For more on Gandy’s work, click here.]
“Looking back, classes like film history, literature, even world history to me seem like interesting subjects to explore when looking for game ideas,” Okafor said. “One of my roommates, who happened to love games and game design as well, really helped push me further along technically and creatively.”
Okafor grew up playing video games and was particularly drawn to the first-person shooter genre. He credited the Tribes series of games as pushing him as a designer to create interesting movement controls.
It was the establishment of the iPhone as a gaming platform that pushed Okafor into creating Tilt to Live and abandoning the PC game prototypes he had been developing. The iPhone has capabilities such as Wi-Fi access, GPS, a camera and an accelerometer that other platforms don’t have. The Apple app store also allows small developers like Okafor to compete on a level playing field with big game studios, he said.
The accelerometer — which registers the orientation and movement of the device for use as a control — in particular seemed promising.
“It’s almost like a game designer’s playground,” Okafor said of the iPhone. “I’m excited to see what games will come to this device once more designers start shedding their PC/console paradigms and really start taking advantage of the technologies available.”
The central idea of Tilt to Live came to him quickly, and he knocked out “a quick and dirty prototype,” he said. With such a basic concept, Okafor knew he needed fun details to make it popular.
“A good bit of the early development was spent creating weapons, but a large chunk of it also was spent on simply trying to polish every detail of the game as much as possible,” Okafor said. “With the game being so simple mechanically I felt it was important to make it eye-catching so people who did see it would be intrigued and hopefully give it a try. Trying to sell someone on the concept of tilting an arrow to avoid and kill dots doesn’t come across as exciting as seeing it in action.”
To that end, he developed behaviors for the dots. When the arrow picks up a weapon, the dots will panic and flee. Other times, the dots assemble into larger shapes such as Pong paddles. Okafor said his goal was to make the game as humorous and fun as possible.
He fleshed out the game over 2009, finally launching it in February. Thanks in part to strong reviews, the game was a hit, becoming one of the most downloaded games on the app store. The success surprised Okafor.
“We initially just hoped we could break even on this game,” he said. “All our play testers thoroughly enjoyed the game, but I didn’t think it’d make as big a splash as it did. A couple of days after launch when all the positive reviews and e-mails started pouring in is when we finally realized Tilt to Live was a bit special.”
Okafor published Tilt to Live through his One Man Left Studios, which he operates part time from Alexandria, Va. The app sells for $1.99 and has a rating of four and a half out of five stars by customers.
Okafor has been pushed to respond to feedback on Tilt to Live, fixing a few bugs and adjusting the game play. He’s preparing to launch some “interesting updates” to add a side-scrolling version of the game and a more difficult mode.
“Every day brings up new challenges I haven’t crossed before since this is our first commercial release,” he said. “It’s a huge learning experience that no amount of classroom time can prepare you for.”
Eventually, though, Okafor plans to move on to new games. He said he doesn’t have concrete plans yet, though he has “lots of ideas.”
“With the iPad around the corner, I hope to get something on that platform as well very soon, but I’m trying not to bite off more than I can chew right now.”
Twitter