Phew

Ahh, Memorial Day weekend is here, the sun is FINALLY shining, and Riptide GP is out there in the Android Market doing it's thing.

We started work on RGP right at the start of January, and finished it in about four and a half months.  That's pretty quick for a game of this type -- by comparison, Hydro Thunder Hurricane took us about a year to finish, not counting the initial prototype.  

Riptide was definitely a push.  We put in some long hours and weekends.  But it seemed to go pretty fast.  We were totally excited about the idea the whole time we were working on it, and the long hours went by in a blur, because we were working hard to make the game better, trying to squeeze in as much polish as we could in the time we had.  It's a lot easier to work hard when you're pumped on what you're doing, instead of working hard just to barely scrape by.

When we started, the goal was to basically just create a super simple water racing game that would show off the graphical power of the Tegra 2 hardware.  But as we got more into it, we decided to add additional features:  the Championship mode, the reverse tracks, all the OpenFeint stuff.  

The whole stunt/boost mechanic got added on a whim in a couple of days right around GDC.  The game was pretty fun at that point but it needed something more, and we figured as long as we have the characters on those hydro jets, we might as well do something interesting with them.  As soon as we got them in there, with the swipe gestures, we knew it had to be a part of the game.

So now it's done and people seem to be enjoying it, and that feels really, really good.  Now we have a chance to take a breath and figure out what comes next.  I took a short vacation last week to NYC, and Ralf is going to sunny Mexico next week for some well deserved margarita therapy.

As for what comes next...... well, we have some ideas.  In fact one idea in particular that we're pretty excited about.  But that's for another post.