TidalWare is today announcing its debut iOS title, Gravity Animals.

Check out the microsite here: http://www.gravityanimals.com/

Explore the skies and beyond, ride rainbows, solve puzzles, and defy gravity in the ultimate 3D pocket platformer. Roll 17 cute animals around 60 crazy levels in 6 unique worlds, with the potential for hundreds more with procedurally generated 3D content. Gravity Animals will be available on iPhone, iPod touch and iPad by the end of the year.

We are showcasing the game at the Develop Indie Dev Day today.

Last year I turned to the iPhone platform. It seemed an excellent starting point for an aspiring developer: make almost anything and distribute it worldwide for just 100$. Ogre 3D also had a very promising port in development, which was great since I had already spent a couple of years working with it. So I began to create a very basic prototype back in November.

8 months into development, and what started out as something simple has become an ambitious project. I never planned anything, so it has pretty much evolved over time. To be honest, I never thought it was even possible on the iPhone.

I took a break early June, and set myself the task of releasing something -anything- into the app store as fast as possible, provided it does what it says on the tin, with no bugs or crashes. 2 weeks later I had done just that. On the 14th day I submitted it to Apple, and by the 20th day it was in the app store. It was a great learning exercise about the process of creating an app from start to finish, using purely the iPhone SDK and Objective-C. Most importantly I got a taster of what the submission process is like.

It’s called Urchin – the app store link is here. It might keep the kids quiet for a little while ;)

Since then I’ve returned to developing my ambitious 3D app. I’m working on it full time around the clock, making exciting progress. Be sure to follow me on my personal Twitter if you’re interested in the development side. Any announcements will be on TidalWare’s twitter.

I will be revealing some details about the project in my next post. Stay tuned!

The good news is that today, there exists more resources, software and knowledge than ever before. We are taking full advantage of this. Now, instead of reinventing the wheel, we can use existing open source libraries such as Ogre 3D. In doing so, we have saved a tremendous amount of time and cost, which means we can concentrate on developing what is important: games.

At the same time, however, we are also developing our own in-house technology from the ground-up, advancing as we grow. TIDE (TidalEngine) is our game engine in development. TIDE is currently a wrapper for multiple libraries (graphics, audio, physics, networking etc.). However, over time we plan to remove each library consecutively and replace it with our own implementations. Tide::Graphics is our first hurdle, and will eventually replace Ogre.

Tide::Graphics is a pure OpenGL engine. We plan to have no (or few) fixed-functions, making it entirely shader-based. We have abstracted OpenGL 2.0 in preparation for a version 3.0 replacement. Our ultimate aim is to develop a cross-platform equivalent to DirectX 10 ‘power-engines’ (e.g. CryEngine – yeah, in our dreams), and show off the real power of OpenGL 3.0. More info on this to follow.

Other projects include a game editor (TidalEd). This allows us to easily build levels, modify object properties with our component-based system, edit materials, create animations, paint terrain, design game logic and so on. This will also be cross-platform.

We are still a long way off from achieving our goals, but as long as we work hard and keep at it, we could indeed catch up with the current game industry in a fraction of the time and cost.