Age of Curling
date
Aug 20, 2023
type
Project
year
2009
slug
age-of-curling
status
Published
tags
Project
Game
summary
Curling through the ages. From a frozen castle’s moat to a modern stadium.
A game about Curling. Originally created for iPhone 3G, later ported to Mac OS X, Widget (remember those?) and PC.
It was one of the top selling games on the Canadian AppStore during the 2010 Olympics, so not at all a bad start for my career as an indie developer! 💪
The first location I created was a loose interpretation of the Bygdøy Curling Hall, where I myself had learnt to play Curling during my time in Norway.
The next location was a big stadium. It was supposed to be an Olympic stadium, but apparently you’re not allowed to even say the word “Olympic” out loud without paying someone somewhere some money, so the AppStore review team made me remove any and all mentions of the word before approving the update.
Further locations were a black-and-white hall in 1920s Winnipeg, a Scottish Castle’s moat as well as frozen-over Venice. Age of Curling, Curling through the ages. Building all those was a lot of fun!
The UI was an interesting challenge to get right. All done in IMGUI.
Most of the on-screen icons were done via a custom font. (I had taken a course about creating custom fonts in FontLab at university, so that was paying off…)
Coming up with the AI Computer Opponent was another interesting challenge. Not only did I have to teach it to throw rocks in such a way that they ended up in a good place, I also had to teach it strategy!
And there it was! My first game as an indie dev on iTunes! (Back then the App Store lived within iTunes)
