Today we officially started our iPhone game project! Our current team consists of the following people:

* Derk – CEO
* Dylan – Product Manager
* Lukas – Lead Programmer
* Tijmen – Programmer
* Niels – Lead Artist
* Lars – Artist Intern
* Thomas – Artist Intern

Not featured in the picture are Derk and Dylan (that’s me). As the two of us will not be working on the game full-time, let’s say we’re a five-and-a-half person team.

Game Design

First up was the design session. Because we’re all very passionate about games, emotions flared up right away! So truthfully, we were off to a rocky start. We needed to focus on our respective roles to move the creative process forward.

We quickly established our domains, using Scrum as our project management method of choice. Dylan will be Product Owner, Niels will be Scrum Master and Lukas will be the Designer. Simply put, Dylan makes sure we’re building a great product, Niels watches over the production process and the team, and Lukas is responsible for gameplay and fun-factor. (This is in addition, of course, to our other roles).

After a nice lunch we took another shot at game design, and this time, we had an awesome vibe going on! Within soon, we had defined a scope and core mechanic for our iPhone project. It involves arcade action, is quick-paced, easy to pick up and should offer a lot of crazy fun!

Tomorrow we’ll be revealing much more of our concept. I hope to be able to include a few sketches and references as well!

The Paladin Studios team is about to begin one of their biggest challenges yet. We are going to make an iPhone game from start to finish, in just two weeks!

Even though our team consists of experienced professionals, the iPhone platform is completely new to us. We’ll be working with Unity, a development tool that allows for great speed. We already used it for making our biggest game yet, EnerCities. But that’s for PC and Mac… the iPhone has rules of its own!

In the upcoming two weeks, we will do our best to share as much of the creative process as possible. We’ll be talking about our gameplay ideas. We’ll show concept art and in-game screenshots as we’re making them. We’re inviting you to share your thoughts on everything we do. We hope you’ll help us test a rough version as soon as we release it. And on Friday April 2nd, we’ll be submitting the game to the App Store, no matter what.

Think we’re crazy? Be sure to follow our adventures on our Dev Blog, on Twitter, on our Facebook page and on several forums on the Net. Hopefully you’ll be as excited about this as we are.

This is a timelapse video of EnerCities that shows some tips and tricks for building your city. We start off with a small village, and proceed to build offshore windmills, several industrial structures, more urban areas, and some super power plants:

Check out EnerCities.eu to give it a try yourself!