My wife prepared an amazing surprise for us for our third wedding anniversary; she bought two tickets for the Cirque Du Soleil. I was thrilled with the acrobatic performance and stunned by the colors in the show.

As you might remember from my previous post: “Where it all began…” my brother and I are “nightshift” mobile game developers; so, the day after the show I called to persuade him that we needed to create an acrobatic circus-like game with changing colors, fireworks and explosions. We wanted to create a game play experience similar to the one spectators experienced in the circus show; an experience where the player would need to use speed, concentration and agile capabilities to beat the levels - similar to a juggling performance.

We started prototyping and thinking about the game play… using convenient and quite inexpensive Paper Prototyping technique ;-).

We decided to create a game similar to “ball brick breaker” games except ours would take place in a moving tunnel with wavy colorful walls and multiple balls that would simulate a juggling experience.

Once we knew what we were trying to build, my brother started preparing static graphics, music and sound effects. I, on the other hand, started scratching my head trying to figure out how I would create a tunnel with constantly changing stripes and awesome colors like I saw in the Cirque Du Soleil show.

After “wrestling” with different ways of generating tunnels with wavy colorful walls for about a week or two I finally had the moving tunnel!

I don’t want to bore with technical details of the implementation here; however, if you’re interested in how to achieve this kind of effect in your game you can find an awesome step-by-step guide to a similar technique at a very popular Ray Wenderlich Forum. (Unfortunately, I found this after I already made my tunnel work :-( …don’t make the same mistake; don’t waste your time reinventing something that somebody already published.)

Several months later, working evenings and weekends, we finally released Tunnel Juggler.

So… Ladies and Gentleman, please welcome on the stage this evening’s entrainment, the Tunnel Juggler. We appreciate all your feedback, ideas for improvements and critiques.