Pitman

Pitman

3D roguelike

• for the Rat King

• iOS: March - May 2011, Win+Mac: January/February 2012

• C#/Unity

Additional credits

Jana Reinhardt (art direction, 3d graphics, textures, additional game design)

Kevin MacLeod (music)

► Chad Bagaason (additional music track)

Videos

Trailer (iOS)

Trailer (PC)

Links

Project page

Online-Demo

BUY

After we finished “Pitman Krumb” (our first 7-Day-Roguelike-Challenge entry from 2011) we were very happy how it turned out. And after I spent an extra week to make a fixed version, The Rat King decided to make a commercial game out of it as soon as possible. Because we tried to get into the iPhone/iPad market back then, the new Pitman should become an app for iOS. And so it became.

After ca. five weeks of porting, extending, balancing and testing, the newly named “Pitman” was finished and ready to submit to the AppStore. On May 2nd it was officially released to the digital world, and some days later “Pitman Free” was approved by Apple, too. This way, people can test the game’s first half dungeon without paying anything in advance.

Of course, the biggest part of the changes are related to the interface. Not only would the screen be cluttered with buttons and information regarding skills if we had adopted the PC version’s screen layout, but there also would be no intuitive method to control the camera. Thus the inventory and the skill overview got extra screens which can be accessed by tapping the player character. Besides, the original Pitman has no main menu or the like, so this had to be added, too.

In order to allow precise and extensive camera control the game got ingame buttons for translating rotating and resetting the camera. This was tweaked a lot and we think the game is very usable; in fact, we never got negative feedback regarding the controls, be it iPad or iPhone:

Another change for the iOS version is the addition of real save slots. This changes the gameplay, as the average roguelike has permadeath, but we knew it would get us some very bad reviews if the players couldn’t save and load their games.

There is more, like help screens and additional content, but I think it’s suffice to say that we didn’t do a half-hearted job when porting it; especially if you compare the development times of the original game “Pitman Krumb” and “Pitman” … It’s like the saying goes, 80% of the time is spent on 20% of the project.

Over half a year later, Pitman was ported back to PC. The reason for this mainly was that it was easy enough to do, and we wanted to try out several selling platforms, like Desura and IndieGameStand; and compare them to the only market we knew until then - the AppStore from Apple.

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