Lift Off: The Last Rocket Development Diary

by Shaun Inman

The Last Rocket was an experiment with two goals: make an awesome iOS game and document the process to better understand what goes into making an awesome game. Lift Off is the resulting document. Less “how to”, more “what have I done!”, this Development Diary is just that, a diary, consisting of equal parts enthusiasm and introspection.

iOS optimized; includes:

Almost 140 days of notes of varying length
Screenshots and videos of abandoned ideas
Unused and work-in-progress audio tracks
Screenshots of all 45 levels from an early build
Final level planning notes
Preface and Postmortem
Hundreds of contextually relevant tweets
Spoilers! Be sure to play the game first

Genres: Nonfiction

268 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Stephen Houser · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great story. Understand it is not a book, it is a development diary. Interesting reading for anyone thinking about developing an app or application.

Also...
"Subtracting Apple’s cut and dividing by the number of hours spent, I made approximately $13 an hour—or almost twice the federal minimum wage." says it all in a nutshell.

Recommend for app developer want to be people, but not for the average folk.

[Todd · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really neat and inspiring development journal. Clearly meant to be read on an Idevice, it's vey interactive, but honestly it's just a really great overview of the development process within a really good game.

Coders! Check this out. Non-coders will probably get bored.

[Radimir Bitsov · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice and pleasant to read diary about the creative and development process behind one of my favorite mobile games. Especially I liked the postmortem section and more specifically the lessons learned paragraph.

[Ray · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's surprising how engaged I was reading Shaun's development diary. Inspires you to get out there and build your own 8-bit wonder!