The Long Journey Here, Part 4: Xbox Live Indie Games feature

April 18th, 2012. This was the last official release of Cylinder back on the Xbox Live Indie Games program on the Xbox 360 platform. It was the last in a series of small releases from Mighty Rabbit Studios prior to our first 'real' game coming out: Saturday Morning RPG. The previous games are mostly forgotten by anyone who didn't work on them, include outstanding titles such as Bed Intruders, Tiger Blood and Cute Zombies.

Since the mobile scene was so hot at the time, the first 3 small games we made were all developed for iOS in particular. We had earned an okay amount of money on them combined; nothing life sustaining, but enough to keep us motivated on Saturday Morning RPG. And that was key I think. Keeping motivation up and sights on a positive goal for such a long term project is difficult. Cylinder was also supposed to be a pretty small effort overall.

The idea was to take 1 month to port the iOS version of Cylinder from 2009 to the Xbox Live Indie Game service, while adding one key feature back to the game from an earlier prototype: split-screen multiplayer. Now with 4 players instead of just 2. The idea seemed sound, the code and assets were all there more or less, and the original hope for me with Cylinder was for it to be on Xbox in the first place.

Of course when actually making a game, and in the game industry in general, things got more complicated and took more time. Some of it was just not knowing what I was getting into, and other things were just desire and ambition to do more. For instance, completely updating all the environment and tile assets for the game (though I felt the mobile UI assets worked relatively well with the new console version).

One of the more interesting challenges was converting all of the code from Objective-C to C#. The process itself really wasn't all that difficult, but boy was it time consuming. The more nuanced things involved adjusting rendering code from the OpenGL setup to work within XNA. The most difficult part of this was figuring out how to batch render all the tiles together to maintain a suitable frame-rate for 4 player games, but otherwise the game ran pretty darn well which was pretty nice considering the reflection effect in place.

As the project continued, we decided I needed help to finish things: enter Chris and Kurt. These guys were great in getting the game into shape and making the whole experience more manageable. The other major challenge for us was getting approval for the game on the service. Because the Indie Games channel was a self regulated the community, the experience could vary wildly depending on who ended up looking at your game. I do believe in made us make a more solid game, but several times we got nailed for issues which we saw in previously released games on the service, which is of course frustrating. This was one of the reasons it took the game so long to release, as each time we entered certification it'd be a week, and if we failed on anything it took a whole other week after that at a minimum.

Ultimately, I believe it was all too little too late. Hype had died off the platform as the most interesting games had come and gone, in the process proving there wasn't viable income with XBLIG. Games like Breath of Death VII is a good example, where it earned significantly more and in less time on Steam. Several Minecraft like games did do pretty well still, but that ended too since Minecraft officially came out on the Xbox 360 (Digital release was May 9th 2012).

While this last version of Cylinder did not reach the hopes we had for it, it was still a great achievement for me and the people who worked on it. Some of us frequently thought about bringing the game back out, changing the engine it was developed on, or putting it into VR. There were a few times work was done towards those goals, but nothing really ever got momentum. Until next time, on The Long Journey Here, 2022 to now.

A few videos showing off this version of the game: