[GDN] Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Brian Robbins and I am the founder of Riptide Games. I’m primarily a developer, but since I’m the only person at Riptide I end up doing a bit of everything. With Gravity Sling I teamed up with a few other local devs, several of which I had worked with before. We started this as part of a 12-hour game jam, and had so much fun with it that we decided to finish it up and submit to the app store. Of the 5 people who worked on it, 4 of us are programmers and we had one sound guy.

[GDN] Where/How did the idea for Gravity Sling come about?

As a game mechanic it’s something that I’ve seen several times over the years. There wasn’t any specific reference but the closest is probably Spaced Penguin from BigIdeaFun though I didn’t actually find that link again until after we had released Gravity Sling. I’ve spent a lot of time playing that in the past. [smiles] Ultimately though, we started out with the gravity idea, and then we tweaked and changed it as we went. I wouldn’t say it was any one single reference or point.

[GDN] Who was involved in the creation of the game during Game Jam?

The initial development was Jonathan Hartstein (PyroMonkey Productions) Eric Lannan (Crucial Games), and myself. We started at 7pm and finished up around 7am. After that, we added Ben Long (NoiseBuffet) and Seth Howard (Spatial Reasoning). Ben is doing all the audio for Gravity Sling, and Seth has helped out with everything but is primarily focused on porting it to Palm Pre.

[GDN] Can you give us more information about what the 360iDev iPhone Game Jam is?

The 360iDev Game Jame was the initial brain child of Noel Llopis from Snappy Touch, who made Flower Garden. As I understand it he mentioned it to a couple people on Sunday at the 360iDev conference, and there was enough interest to make it happen Tuesday night. Essentially we had about 30 developers all come in and start developing their game at 7pm and we had to be done by 7am the following morning. I think about 10-15 projects were built and while most were just experiments there’s a few that are going to make it into the App Store. Obviously Gravity Sling was the first, but I know that Imangi Studios just submitted their game Hippo High Dive as well.