How Halfbrick Studios Develops Games Like Fruit Ninja, Age Of Zombies And Jetpack Joyride

?This is the original concept shot for Fruit Ninja which was pitched to the company during Halfbrick Fridays. This is literally the very first piece of Fruit Ninja imagery ever created, so it?s historically significant,” Halfbrick Studio‘s Chief Marketing Officer Phil Larsen said in an email to me last week after I interviewed him and his colleague Richard McKinney, the company’s Chief Technology Officer, about how the company develops its games. Halfbrick Fridays is one of the ways the Brisbane, Australia-based company comes up with new ideas for its games. Fruit Ninja – its greatest hit to date – came out of this. Halfbrick Fridays About five to seven times a year, the company organizes these Halfbrick Fridays, they told me, where the whole company (about 70 people at this point), breaks into groups of around five people to brainstorm new ideas. The cool thing here is that it’s not just the game designers and developers who participate, but anybody who works for the company – be that in accounting or quality assurance – participates in these sessions. Age of Zombies, for example, is the result of this process (though Larsen and McKinney told me the final version looked very different from the prototype). So is Monster Dash. These events either last for about a week or are spread out to one day during a period of about five to seven weeks. Once the idea for Fruit Ninja was born, it only took a few months to make, but some game ideas, the team told me, have been floating around for years and have yet to become reality. From Idea To Game What’s interesting about how Halfbrick turns its game ideas into actual products is that virtually all of its games use one underlying engine (written almost exclusively in C++). The core engine team consists of six “hardcore programmers,” as McKinney told me, and they ensure that those teams that work on the individual games have a stable architecture that they can then write their own code for. One of Halfbrick’s larger teams, by the way, is now the cloud service team that provides the back-end technology to connect games together across platforms. Halfbrick uses Amazon’s EC2 platform for this and recently switched to a NoSQL database for better scalability. The point of the core engine, the team stressed, is to be able to publish apps across platforms as easily

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