iRis AG – iPhone Game made with Blender

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icon_mediumHi I’ve spent the past few months working with RPN interactive on an iPhone game, using Blender heavily in our pipeline for 3D assets and animations. All the 3D assets for the game and many animations for 2D elements were done with Blender, and other open source software (GIMP and Inkscape) were used for the 2D assets. You can take a look at my blog post on using blender to make the game.  – Ben Simonds

The official site for the game.

BlenderArtist Discussion

The game is available on the App Store now for $1.99 with a free lite version on offer too.

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    • banor

      Nice :)

    • Velu

      Interesting twist on tetris like puzzlers. looks clean and professional. Congratulations. I hope the best for you guys.

    • Gryphon

      Small note: “iRis” in the App Store is a network management solution. You’ll probably notice it’s not what you’re looking for when you see the price indicated as $4.99. Also, there’s another game called “Iris Lite,” which also appears to be unrelated.

      The game mentioned in the article is called “iRis AG.”

      As for the lite version, it seems to not be available in the US App Store yet/anymore? Am I just missing something? The link on the official site seems to work, but iTunes doesn’t seem to be aware of a lite version. Is it still being screened by Apple?

    • Benjy

      Hi
      In response to Gryphon’s comments: You are correct in that iRis AG is the proper full name of the game, and iRis is indeed some sort of network management solution of some sort.

      The Lite Version of the game should be avaliable soon. Apple had some issue with one of the keywords used to describe the name, namely “geWiz ES”, which is the name of our engine. Unfortunately Apple didn’t realise we owned the rights to use this in our advertising and didn’t approve the app on schedule. Rest assured that we are working to resolve this and as soon as apple gets this sorted the lite version will be on sale.

      Also, please go and comment on the game on the BlenderArtists forum thread here: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=169334

    • http://www.animationbytim.com/ Tim Formica [Room335]

      Ben, I updated the post.

    • Benjy

      Thanks Tim.

    • http://www.roguepirateninja.com Johannes

      Very cool post!

      Lite version is still “in review”. Apple decided to wait two weeks before telling us that we couldn’t use the name of the engine in our keyword listing, even though we’ve done the same thing for the full version (both v1.0 and v1.1) w/o issue. Resubmitted App and they are back at playing the waiting game with us for, probably two more weeks. :/ Can’t do anything more from my end, sadly.

      A note about the Blender aspect of this…

      Ben is a great artist. He does some pretty cool work. I’ve worked with several artists already and, for whatever reason, they all failed to really produce. Ben however has been an absolute gem and has gone above and beyond the call of duty (so to speak) and has a real passion for his craft. He is an exceptional artist and can knock things together in ways that blows my mind.

      The 3D work came together very rapidly, and it was in large part thanks to the Blender team for writing a great product as well as Ben spending the countless hours learning and building up his knowledge base of the program. It really has shown, since day one, that Ben had a great grasp of what he was doing. That critical component, that professional talent and knowledge plays a huge role in the development cycle. Planning is definitely required (and we’re doing a lot more of that next go around), but that execution phase is still the most important, and Ben nailed it.

      Since Blender is free to use, that aided immensely on the business end of things, giving us no overhead fees. I don’t think this point can be made any clearer: Blender is a great tool, and is an immense aide for the Indie developer like us. We wouldn’t have gotten this far without it.

      On my end, I’ve went in and used the python side of Blender to write an exporter script to convert from Blender and into our native file format (GAMX -> Game Asset Manifest XML), and, heh, had a few bumps in the road, but a lot has been ironed out. We can import a lot of work out of Blender and into the game engine and that entire pipeline works really slick. Next thing on my list is of course a viewer/editor App that lets Ben see the finished import into the engine, as well as toy with values and adjust several things more relevant to game development.

      At any rate – hope to have iRis AG Lite up on the App Store soon. Remember, we’re an Indie game studio, and supporting us is not like supporting big name company – quite the contrary. We’re not all about profits (a few people in the big business field I’ve talked to seem to not always be able to grasp that point), but rather center on making a great game first and foremost. We’re dedicated to the community of gamers around us, and thanks for the post Blender Nation!

    • guerrierhardcore

      Excellent.
      I’ll get the game today.

      Now when the game will be availlaible for the Blackberry? ( Always ready to test btw ).

    • http://www.roguepirateninja.com Johannes

      @guerrierhardcore heh, thanks mate! :) Really appreciate it. Sadly, the contracts we sign into with Apple to even get it on the App Store locks us into an exclusivity clause… so… yeah… sorry :(

      On the flip side though, we’re moving onto new ideas at this point, and hopefully this next attempt will be better than the first. It’s a slow iterative process, and… at least we have some branding and at least one published title to back us up on. =)

      I should have mentioned, I would love to, at some time, probably in the bit more distant future, release our engine to the public so others can also use it to build Apps with, and particularly utilize the excellent Blender -> Game pipeline we’ve been working over. I’ve been really considering publishing it under a MIT license, but putting all the key documentation (not the Doxygen reference guide) into a 50$ book. Just thoughts at the moment.

    • Gryphon

      I should have mentioned, I would love to, at some time, probably in the bit more distant future, release our engine to the public so others can also use it to build Apps with, and particularly utilize the excellent Blender -> Game pipeline we’ve been working over. I’ve been really considering publishing it under a MIT license, but putting all the key documentation (not the Doxygen reference guide) into a 50$ book. Just thoughts at the moment.

      I like that idea. :)

    • http://digitaldraw.wordpress.com/ aws357

      I demand an Android version !!! :D

    • http://www.roguepirateninja.com Johannes

      @Gryphon Heh, the issue that we have, though, is that we wrote a large part of our library in C and Objective-C. We have a lot of trickery going on to skip the dylookup issues in our low code tier sections, but it’s going to be a long while before the development community ever accepts Objective-C as a platform for game development. Of course this coming from a mainly C/C++/C# programmer. ;)

      @aws357 Beside the contract stuff we’re signed into with Apple, the game heavily relies on OpenGL for the 3D rendering tasks, sooo…, we’re kinda stuck out of Android from a simple technical standpoint since it uses Java. Same goes for PalmPre with it’s webOS interface.

    • http://www.roguepirateninja.com Johannes

      TheiPhoneAppReview gives iRisAG us a solid 7/10, props for color-blind mode; RPNi’s first release not bad at all! http://tinyurl.com/yzoxoc5

      Also, the free iRis AG Lite is now up on the App Store! http://bit.ly/1YZGnI

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