Games and reality are very different. The moves you use in games every day are actually pretty impossible when you do the math, and most people accept it as ‘normal’ or ‘a fact of gaming life.’
Well, the Callipix team look at things a little differently. Stack Heroes is probably the most life like stacker we have ever seen and is extremely easy to play. For most players, playing this game should feel surprisingly natural, and is no doubt due to its physics.
In our interview with the Callipix team, we were told that one of their goals was to make Stack Heroes “as realistic as possible.”
We must say, they definitely succeeded…
Before we start, I’d like to thank Claude Jegouic, the Lead Developer of the Callipix team, for participating in our interview, and for spending some of his valuable time in answering our questions. Thank you very much Claude.
Now without any further ado our interview begins.
Ok first up, why did you decide to make Stack Heroes?
When we started working on Stack Heroes we wanted to deliver the first no-compromise stacking game. By “no-compromise” I mean something without any limits, just as realistic as possible. Stacking is just a primary game concept but still we believed that nothing on the App Store was really pushing it right. We wanted a pure stacking game, not a mix of Tetris with some sort of physics, slow, limited and not really refreshing… but just a pure stacker game without any limits: fast-paced, colorful and music-fuelled!
Awesome, so what programming language and or software did you use when making Stack Heroes?
Our studio is primarily focused on the Apple App Store and the latest iOS versions. Therefore, Stack Heroes was first developed in native Objective-C using the SpriteKit framework from Apple. Globally we really like this framework, it’s very well documented, super fast to use, and most importantly we always get great support from Apple when we face any issues. Also it is a great plus for us to know that the framework we use will be supported and always improved by Apple itself. Later, Stack Heroes was ported to Android using Unity3D and C#.
Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop were used for all the graphics of the game.
Ok, here is a mean question. What was the hardest problem you needed to overcome when developing Stack Heroes?
The hardest problem was to manage the performance of the physic simulation for as many devices as possible. At first, older iOS devices were not able to handle the no-limit aspect of the game. Some players are able to build very high and very strong towers, above 4000m high and such towers are very costly in terms of physic simulation. It was even worse for Android. A lot of optimisation was required to provide a smooth but realistic simulation to as many players as possible.
Last question. Where do you get your inspiration or ideas from?
This is definitely a hard question to answer. Finding a new idea for a new game is always a collective process. We are a small core team of 3 people, we regularly arrange brain storming meetings and all our games come from here. During these meetings we all have ideas which come from almost everything and everywhere, no limit. We compile, arrange, but mainly we prototype a lot because most of our final ideas are born from our prototypes.
A few words to Stack Heroes fans on Edamame Reviews.
At Callipix we really love to work on physic-based games. If you enjoyed this aspect of Stack Heroes you should definitely love our new side-scrolling platformer REC which is going to be released on the App Store… this week!
Lastly a few words on how you feel about Edamame Reviews and our service.
It was a great pleasure to work with the Edamame team. They were very professional and very kind at the same time. A great service!
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