Yacine Salmi, one half of a two-man development team, took some time to chat with us about Ellipsis’s creation and development process.
GameSkinny: What games, art and experiences influenced Ellipsis?
GS: What made you take the plunge into game development?
GS: In your press kit, you mentioned that you purposefully made Ellipsis without text to make it accessible to gamers from other countries. Is this something you’ll incorporate in games moving forward?
GS: If you could go back to the beginning knowing what you know now, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
GS: Can you share a memorable success and a memorable disappointment during the development process?
Biggest disappointment…releasing the game in a broken state for all players on iOS 7. It was such a simple stupid oversight, and easy to fix. It took us weeks to even understand what was causing people to have crashes. And when we discovered the cause (and the simple fix), we had to hold back on deploying it because of how updates reset your ratings on iOS. I was very disappointed that we made such a simple oversight after all the efforts we put into the game. But such is life and we certainly learned from it.
Ah let’s balance that one out with one more success point: getting featured in Spiegel Online (Germany’s equivalent of the New York Times) was simply amazing.
GS: What advice do you have for those hoping to make their own game?
GS: What’s next for Ellipsis and Salmi Games?
Ellipsis is available for purchase for $2.99 on iOS and Android. It will be available on PC/Steam later this year, so stay posted via newsletter.
Another (free) level pack for Ellipsis to round off the year. Think ‘secret road’ from Super Mario World. It will be super hard. A GearVR version of Ellipsis - this one is super fun. Prototyping a procedurally-generated infinite version based in the same universe. And experimenting like crazy with room-based VR. We’re very excited about the possibilities in this area. So many new design problems to solve.
