Creating Trixel: Designing for the iPhone
Justin F. | Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 1:48PM 
Trixel is a puzzle game for the iPhone whereby players are tasked with flipping dual-colored tiles to match a pre-determined pattern within a limited number of moves. Progressing through the game not only unlocks harder puzzles and special tiles with varying effects, it also plays havoc with the player's brain. Trixel designer Dan Boutros talked to Digital Kuroko about what it was like to develop on the platform and some of the unique challenges faced along the way as Trixel evolved. You can listen to the interview here.
The life of Trixel is chronicled below, from its early inception to the final product.
Coming together out of a mutual acquaintance, the team that developed Trixel has a pedigree behind them that includes some of the top studios in the industry.
"Eran, Rich and Paul Ashdown, they make up this team called EXAKT and these guys are basically trouble shooters for the big companies," says Dan Boutros. "They actually ported Call of Duty 3 to Wii, just the two of them, in nine months. Thats basically the stuff they do. So they're really really good at coding. Before that they worked on True Crime and I think they helped out on Call of Duty 5 as well.
"Josh he worked at Insomniac on Resistance and Ratchet and Clank. He did all the CG for Spyro the Dragon. it was just him and his friend pretty much, all the CG cinematics in the original Spyro, those two guys."
Team managers TJ Summers and Andy Cheren also run Production Road and Digital Artist Management, companies which recruit and place talent around the games and movie industries; they've both previously been attached to NCSoft, Naughty Dog, LucasArts, Sega, and a host of others.
"So yeah a very good team. This was a very good team throw in to make something very, very quickly and make it good, so that was a real challenge. You can have good people but quality takes time."
One of the earliest design ideas for Trixel (then called iFlipper) was to incorporate a users' iTunes library from their phone as the background music to the game. The first draft of the design document also was aiming for integration of the music with the graphics, creating a pulsing, sensory light show (as seen below).
From the original design document
"In the beginning it was the same concept of moving a cursor around and flipping tiles and you had a pattern and a move count," Dan elaborates. "The original concept had move count or time count as two different modes and it would give you a physical reward. So you would have your bronze, silver, gold thing, but you would also have unlockable backgrounds that you could use for your iPhone. So every time you beat a level, bam, you got a new background."
Early versions of Trixel experimented with different art styles, like this comic book-inspired design.
Unfortunately, that particular method of rewarding the player had to be changed when the team realized they were looking at licensing costs for pre-constructed art or the time spent creating their own. There was also a concern that the game would not fit inside the 10 MB limit the app store requires for a game to be downloadable over 3G.
"It's pretty much completely different to what it was on that piece of paper. Paper designs usually don't end up... the final product never ends up the what the paper design was because you have to iterate and see what's fun and all that other crap."
On the audio front, Dan originally wanted the soundtrack to be reggae, but the team didn't quite follow him on that decision. Instead, they went to some producers for some original compositions.
Says Dan: "Guys called Prison Diet; really really good musicians. They do stuff for like TV and ads and whatnot. They were friends of Andy Cheren who was the guy who basically put us all together on this and he just got them in and we heard their stuff and we're like, 'that's really bloody good, let's use it.' Everyone seemed to be happy with the tracks we picked out. It was more of a group thing. I really like their music, I think they're very talented guys."
It turns out that the main inspiration for Trixel came from last year's standout indie title World of Goo. Spurred on by the concept in that game, Dan adopted World of Goo's simplicity motif for his own machinations.
"It's a completely different game now. Before it was a lot more casual and one-layered. Now you've got something a lot more, I'd say it's.....the other guys would argue with me and say it's casual. I don't thinks it's casual, I think it's quite tough." -Dan Boutros
"I was talking with my friend Chris who's another designer," Dan says. "He was a designer on the original Medal of Honor, really bloody knows his stuff. Top lad. He was talking about how some of the best design comes from the most simple limited rulesets. One thing I've always struggled with in design is that here's this great idea, okay let's add loads of really cool shit to it. It tends to work, the chemistry tends to work out, but it feels like it needs all of it there to be fun. I don't know, it's a different way of working, and it just seemed like a really good challenge to come up with something so dirt simple that would be fun in its simplicity. Then I played World of Goo and that just blew my mind in that way and I thought: okay, I'm going to try and do something along these lines of simplicity."
That theory seems to have worked; Trixel has received critical acclaim from the likes of CO-OP and VG247 as well as picking up a nomination for a Golden Joystick Mobile Game of the Year award.
So what's next? Will there be another game?
"Honestly, after this game and the amount of life bullshit that it's actually hit, I'm actually thinking about that right now," Dan says. "There is one game I want to do right now, and I've got an offer for it and I want to get it made. After that I don't know. 18 hour days for two and a half months is very stupid and it was very painful for me, for the ex-girlfriend..."
Trixel is available on the iPhone app store for $0.99.
Dan Boutros, Trixel, iPhone in Features
Reader Comments (5)
Nice game, where is the link to home page or where from i can download it?
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